Traditional copper connections can no longer keep pace with the bandwidth and thermal demands of today’s AI factories, opening the door for light-based photonic fabrics that promise faster communication, lower energy use and higher GPU utilization. This evolution marks a turning point where data movement — not compute — has become the defining factor in the race to build the next era of intelligent infrastructure, according to Preet Virk, co-founder and chief operating officer of Celestial AI Inc. GPUs must be connected efficiently across racks and even data centers, while managing heat, power and bandwidth. Copper connections can’t keep up at scale. That’s where photonics — a light-based interconnect technology — emerges as the clear solution, according to Virk. “What we focused on is the photonic fabric and the scale-up network day one, not scale-out. That’s where, as they say, the pain is, and that’s where the photonic fabric comes in. What we allow is for the industry to build very large clusters in a very efficient fashion.” In modern AI data centers, data movement, not compute, is the largest energy drain.