The AI Boom Is Fueling a Need for Speed in Chip Networking

Next-gen networking tech, sometimes powered by light instead of electricity, is emerging as a critical piece of AI infrastructure. The new era of Silicon Valley runs on networking--and not the kind you find on LinkedIn. As the tech industry funnels billions into AI data centers, chip makers both big and small are ramping up innovation around the technology that connects chips to other chips, and server racks to other server racks. Networking technology has been around since the dawn of the computer, critically connecting mainframes so they can share data. In the world of semiconductors, networking plays a part at almost every level of the stack--from the interconnect between transistors on the chip itself, to the external connections made between boxes or racks of chips.