The imec Report: Scaling Optical Interconnects For The AI Era

The explosive growth of cloud computing and AI – from generative, and reasoning, to (ultimately) agentic systems – is creating unprecedented demand for bandwidth, as the amount of data that must be moved both within and between data centers continues to surge. In turn, this exposes growing limitations in the underlying interconnects that not only span the data center fabric and rack level but also extend deep inside servers – down to where they link XPUs, memory, and other system components at t