Photonics at the speed of AI: Charting the industry’s shift from compute to communication

Yole Group announced the release of Photonics at the Speed of AI, part of the AI White Papers Collection. The paper argues that optical transceivers, once a supporting piece of data center infrastructure, have become a system-level requirement for scaling artificial intelligence, and it anchors Yole Group’s broader 2026 photonics collection of market & technology intelligence analyses. For most of the past decade, optical transceivers were infrastructure: important, technically demanding, but in