The massive sums being spent on data center infrastructure reflect a surge in demand for AI, both to train frontier models, and to perform the inference operations which drive the outputs of agents such as ChatGPT and Claude.

AI data centers are made up of networks of processors and memory devices. Today, the majority of the links which connect computing systems are made of copper wires, in the form of backplanes and cables. But now data centers are faced with the challenge of massively increasing network bandwidth both within and between servers.

The traditional technical…