What It Means: This advancement will enable the production of the optical source with the required performance for future high-volume applications, such as co-packaged optics and optical compute interconnect for emerging network-intensive workloads including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The laser array is built on Intel's 300-millimeter silicon photonics manufacturing process to pave the way for high-volume manufacturing and broad deployment. By 2025, Gartner forecasts that silicon photonics will be used in more than 20% of all high-bandwidth data center communications channels, up from less than 5% in 2020, and will represent a total available market of $2.6 billion. The growing demand for low power consumption, high bandwidth and faster data transfer is driving the need for silicon photonics to support data center applications and beyond. Why It Matters: Optical connections began replacing copper wires in the 1980s due to the inherent high bandwidth of light transmission in optical fibers instead of electrical impulses transmitted through metal wires.