Conversation with Ayar Labs CEO Mark Wade on Silicon Photonics, Co-Packaged Optics, and Next-Gen AI Infrastructure

Ayar Labs is betting optical connectivity becomes a standard TSMC-foundry feature, targeting an IPO as CPO deploys in GPUs around 2028-2029.

• Interconnect is the bottleneck: Wade says AI data center revenue scaling is now limited by scale-up fabric interconnect performance, not just GPU or memory supply, forcing a shift from electrical to optical connectivity.
• Why now, not five years ago: Ayar Labs was founded out of MIT in 2015, but Wade says ChatGPT's release was the wake-up call that gave tier-one semiconductor volume ecosystems a reason to commit to optical I/O.

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