Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Photonic computing is like hollow core fibre. The advantages are so great in each case that their long term adoption appears almost inevitable. Logic gates in traditional silicon-based computing rely on using electric charges to represent binary information. The drawbacks are quite clear. The electricity becomes heat. In the presence of high transistor density this translates to calculation errors as well as hardware failure. In turn, high heat requires cooling systems and more electricity. Indeed, electricity is the largest operating expense for a data centre. In 2025 Equinix facilities consumed 8.6 Terawatt hours. A good guess is that at least 60% of the firm's cost of revenues is power. In 2025 the Equinix cost of revenue totalled $4.5 billion so power costs were at least $2.7 billion.  In contrast, photonic computers uses infrared lasers on chips. This consumes a fraction of the power that silicon wafers need. Residual heat is minuscule so the cooling demand drops substantially...

 The photonic revolution began with optical fibre, but it will end with optical computers. The German company Q.ANT has designed and is manufacturing itself one of the first all-optical commercial line of computers. Photonic computers are really analogue calculators. The advantage over electron-based digital computers is not the speed of light versus electrons. Their velocities are similar. Instead, the real difference is that digital computers flip zeros and ones using transistors in combination with capacitors. Capacitors must charge and discharge. This takes a lot of time. It also consumes a lot of power all of which ends up as heat. 😃Even a simple addition of two numbers requires approximately 200 transistors. Taking the square root of a number involves 7000 transistors and the work horse Fourier transformation requires roughly 1 million transistors. Note that glasses also passively perform a Fourier transformation. In other words a single optical device in a computer can do a...