The power of future photonic tech

This post is a guest contribution by George Siosi Samuels, managing director at Faiā. See how Faiā is committed to staying at the forefront of technological advancements here.

TL;DR: I’ve been thinking about why photonics—computing with light instead of electrons—matters beyond raw speed. The Netherlands is pouring €1.1 billion into “Photonic Valley” to rival Silicon Valley, but here’s what nobody’s saying: faster data movement without immutable audit trails just means you’re making unverifiable decisions faster. The real breakthrough isn’t photonic chips alone—it’s what happens when light-speed infrastructure converges with cryptographic proof systems. This is the missing architecture for AI at scale.

What is photonics and why does it matter for trust infrastructure?

For decades, silicon-based electronics drove unprecedented advances in computing, communications, and countless other fields. But as we push against the physical limits of silicon transistors, a new paradigm is rising—one based on light rather than electrons.

Photonics is the science of generating, controlling, and detecting photons—particles of light. In computing and communications, this means using light instead of electrons to process and transmit information. The fundamental advantage? Light travels faster, generates less heat, and can carry more data in parallel than electrons.

The performance difference is substantial. While traditional copper-based electronic interconnects max out at around 10 gigabits per second, photonic systems using fiber optics can carry up to 60 terabits per second. Recent demonstrations show integrated photonic transmitters achieving 112 giga-baud transmission rates with picojoule-per-bit energy efficiency. For artificial intelligence (AI) workloads specifically, light-based chips have demonstrated 100-fold improvements in power efficiency compared to conventional silicon.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: integrated photonics—technology that combines multiple optical components (lasers, modulators, detectors) on a single chip—solves the bandwidth problem brilliantly. But it exposes a deeper infrastructure gap that most coverage ignores.

At Faiā, we work at the intersection of emerging technologies—AI, blockchain, digital infrastructure—and what we’re seeing is that speed without verifiability creates systemic fragility. Photonic networks will move petabytes per second between AI training clusters. But who verifies the data lineage? Who audits the model provenance? Who creates the immutable record when those decisions affect compliance, liability, or sovereignty?

Light gives you velocity. It doesn’t give you truth.

Why the Netherlands is building Photonic Valley

The Netherlands has positioned itself as the frontrunner in this photonic revolution through a combination of three decades of research infrastructure, coordinated industrial policy, and manufacturing capacity. Eindhoven (specifically the High Tech Campus region) has become the center of gravity.

The foundation was laid in the early 90s when Eindhoven University of Technology established COBRA (the Inter-university Research Institute on Communication Technology), combining semiconductor materials expertise with optical integration research. That patient, long-term thinking has produced both the talent pipeline and the technical breakthroughs now entering commercial production.

In April 2022, PhotonDelta (a cross-border ecosystem accelerator) secured €1.1 billion ($1.2 billion) in public and private investment, including €470 million ($552 million) from the Dutch National Growth Fund. This six-year program aims to cement the country’s position in integrated photonics by funding startups, expanding production facilities, and training talent.

The ecosystem includes concrete players making real progress:

• Smart Photonics, an independent foundry for photonic integrated circuits founded in 2012, received €35 million ($41.1 million) in Series C funding to expand wafer manufacturing capacity at the High Tech Campus.
• Astrape, spun out of the HighTechXL venture builder in 2022, raised €7.9 million ($9.2 million) to build optical switches that address data center inefficiency.
• Photonfirst, spun out from Technobis in early 2025, is scaling integrated photonic sensing technology for temperature, pressure, and strain measurement after fifteen years of R&D.

This isn’t just venture capital theater. The structural advantage comes from combining long-term research investment, industrial policy, and an established ecosystem of foundries and startups—all concentrated in one region.

My read: Europe learned from losing the semiconductor fabrication race to Taiwan and South Korea. The Netherlands is applying industrial policy before the market commoditizes, not after. Smart.

Back to the top ↑

The convergence thesis: Speed without provenance is just faster chaos

Here’s the part nobody’s writing about yet.

Photonic infrastructure enables AI systems to train faster, infer faster, and coordinate across distributed compute at unprecedented scale. AI systems like GPT-4 require data transfer rates exceeding 800 Gbps between GPU clusters, which copper-based solutions cannot support without signal degradation. Data center operators report a 37% reduction in energy use per bit when migrating from copper cables to optical interconnects.

But faster data movement without cryptographic auditability amplifies risk exponentially.

Consider what happens when an AI model makes a decision that affects regulatory compliance—credit scoring, medical diagnosis, and autonomous vehicle control. The question regulators will ask (and are already asking) isn’t just “what did the model decide?” but “can you prove the provenance of the training data, the integrity of the model weights, and the authenticity of the inference input?”

If your photonic network moved 60 terabits per second through the training pipeline, but you can’t produce an immutable audit trail of what data touched what layer at what timestamp, you have velocity without verifiability. That’s a liability time bomb.

This is where the convergence becomes essential: AI gives you adaptive intelligence. Photonics gives you the bandwidth to scale it. Blockchain gives you the immutable substrate to trust it.

And not just any blockchain. By 2025, machines engaged in generative AI are projected to consume 19% of global data center electricity. If you’re logging training provenance, model versioning, and inference audit trails on chains with high transaction fees and limited throughput, you’re creating a new bottleneck.

This is precisely where systems like BSV blockchain and Teranode, designed for unbounded horizontal scaling and sub-cent transaction costs, become infrastructure-critical, not ideologically interesting. When your photonic network is moving petabyte-scale datasets through AI pipelines, you need a ledger layer that can handle billions of micro-transactions per day without collapsing under its own fee structure.

Photonics enables the speed layer. Blockchain provides the truth layer. Pair them.

Back to the top ↑

Where Asia is quietly leading

While Europe builds fabrication capacity, Asia is also deploying photonic infrastructure at enterprise scale, particularly in data centers and telecommunications.

Major hyperscale operators like Meta (NASDAQ: META) (with significant operations in Singapore) are already deploying 400G optical modules to handle real-time model parallelism across thousands of servers. China’s state-backed data center operators have committed to photonic interconnects as standard architecture for AI-optimized facilities by 2026, according to industry reports.

What’s particularly interesting is how Asian regulators are front-running the convergence question. Singapore‘s Monetary Authority (MAS) and Hong Kong‘s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) are both piloting frameworks that require cryptographic audit trails for AI-driven trading systems, effectively mandating the blockchain layer before the AI layer scales further.

Back to the top ↑

The market opportunity and the hidden infrastructure gap

The silicon photonics market is experiencing explosive growth. From $2.86 billion in 2025, the market is projected to reach $28.75 billion by 2034, a compound annual growth rate of 29.25%. The broader photonic integrated circuits market is even larger, expected to grow from $14.6 billion in 2024 to $98.6 billion by 2034.

This growth is being driven by concrete, immediate demand, particularly from data centers and AI infrastructure. But here’s the infrastructure gap nobody’s pricing in:

Every dollar invested in photonic bandwidth creates a corresponding liability exposure if the audit layer doesn’t scale proportionally.

Think about it: if your data center moves from 100 Gbps copper interconnects to 800 Gbps optical interconnects, you’ve just 8x’d the rate at which unverified data can enter your AI training pipeline. If a compliance failure occurs, the question becomes: “Did you have systems capable of auditing at the speed you were ingesting?”

The market opportunity isn’t just in photonic chips. It’s in the convergence infrastructure—the systems that cryptographically timestamp, hash, and immutably log what’s moving through those optical networks.

From where I sit, the companies that will dominate the next decade aren’t just building faster pipes. They’re building verifiable faster pipes. Speed plus provenance. Not one or the other.

Back to the top ↑

What breaks without the trust layer

Let me ground this in a concrete scenario.

Imagine a global insurance company deploying an AI underwriting system trained on 15 years of claims data. The model runs on photonic-interconnected GPU clusters, processing applications in milliseconds. Six months after deployment, regulators investigate a pattern of discriminatory pricing.

The company needs to prove:

1. Data provenance: Which specific claims records were used in training, from which jurisdictions, with which consent frameworks?
2. Model integrity: Has the model been altered since the compliance audit, and if so, by whom with what authorization?
3. Inference auditability: For the flagged decisions, can you reconstruct the exact input data and model state at the time of inference?

If the photonic infrastructure moved the data too fast for the audit layer to capture cryptographic hashes at each stage, the company has velocity but no defensible record. The speed advantage becomes a liability amplifier.

This is the hidden cost of infrastructure asymmetry.

Now contrast that with a system where every training batch, every model checkpoint, and every inference request is hashed and logged to an immutable ledger, with timestamps, author signatures, and data lineage references. The photonic network still delivers speed. But now the speed is paired with cryptographic proof.

That’s not hypothetical. We’ve been thinking through these architectures with clients at Faiā for years. The pattern is consistent: companies that front-load the trust layer outperform companies that bolt it on after a compliance (or even cultural-attunment) failure.

Back to the top ↑

Practical takeaways for enterprise leaders

If you’re operating data centers, deploying AI systems, or managing compliance for infrastructure-heavy workloads, here’s what needs to be on your roadmap:

• Audit your data center interconnects now: If you’re still using copper for GPU-to-GPU communication above 100 Gbps, you’re already behind. Photonic infrastructure is commercially available today—Smart Photonics, Astrape, and others are shipping production-grade chips, not prototypes.
• Pair bandwidth investments with audit infrastructure: Every increase in data velocity should trigger a corresponding investment in cryptographic logging. If you’re upgrading to 400G optical modules, you need a ledger layer that can handle the transaction volume those speeds generate—without creating a cost bottleneck.
• Pressure vendors for convergence solutions: Ask your infrastructure providers how they’re integrating immutable audit trails at the hardware layer. The companies that survive the next regulatory cycle will be the ones that were designed for provenance from day one, not as an afterthought.
• Watch Asia, not just Europe: While the Netherlands builds fabrication capacity, Asian markets are deploying at scale and integrating regulatory frameworks. If you’re only watching Western announcements, you’re seeing the lab work. Asia is seeing the production deployments.
• Calculate liability exposure, not just bandwidth ROI: Model what happens if you move 8x the data through your AI pipeline but can’t produce audit records 8x faster. The cost of a compliance failure often exceeds the savings from infrastructure efficiency.

Back to the top ↑

Key Insight: Light enables speed. Blockchain enables trust. You need both.

The transition from Silicon Valley to Photonic Valley represents more than a geographical or technological shift. It’s a fundamental rethinking of how we architect systems that operate faster than human oversight can verify.

Light-based computing solves the bandwidth problem. No question. The physics are undeniable. Photons move faster and generate less heat than electrons, enabling AI systems to scale in ways silicon never could.

But speed without verifiability is just expensive chaos.

The next decade belongs to companies and nations that understand the convergence: photonic infrastructure for velocity, blockchain infrastructure for integrity, and AI for adaptive intelligence across both layers.

This is why I’m building Conscious Stack Design™. You don’t optimize for one layer in isolation. You architect for coherence across the full stack, from the physics layer (photonics) to the consensus layer (blockchain) to the intelligence layer (AI).

The infrastructure to enable this is being built now. The Netherlands is funding the fabrication. Asia is deploying at scale. The blockchain layer—specifically systems capable of unbounded transaction throughput—is maturing.

The question isn’t whether Photonic Valley will rival Silicon Valley. The question is whether you’ll build for speed alone or for speed with proof.

Explore the convergence. The “age of light” is here. The real trust layer is next.

Back to the top ↑

Watch: Building more trustworthy internet of the future with Metanet