LIGHT THE WAY

PHOTONIC CHIPS COULD SPEED AI WHILE DECREASING ITS ENERGY USAGE

- DAMIEN MARTIN

AI might ramp up our computing ability to levels we could previously only imagine. But it uses up a great deal of energy in doing so. And as we incorporate AI into more facets of life, we'll need more power to keep it running. The IEA estimates that in 2026 energy demand from AI will be 10 times what it was in 2023. It doesn't seem likely that we're going to ditch AI anytime soon, which means we need a more efficient way of producing it. The solution might lie in the fastest thing in the universe: light.

Photonic Power

Traditional computing runs on electrons. Electronic chips require a lot of electricity to function, and they need even more when powering AI because their processing and memory are separated. They have to work hard to transfer data between the two. Light, on the other hand, not only travels faster than anything else but encounters little resistance as it does so.

Light-based chips that run on photons instead of electrons have a higher bandwidth than electronic chips, meaning they can transmit more information. And with optical frequencies higher than electrical ones, these chips could perform computations faster with less latency, a boon to edge computing.

Photonic chips are "paving the way for breakthroughs in fields that demand high-speed and high-efficiency processing, such as artificial intelligence," University of Cambridge physicist Natalia Berloff told Quanta Magazine.