Beyond Silicon: How Photonic Integrated Circuits Are Powering the AI, Quantum, and Sensing Revolution in 2025–2026

Introduction: The End of the Electronic Interconnect Era The global AI boom of 2025–2026 is colliding with a fundamental physical constraint: the limits of electricity itself. Frontier AI systems now rely on hyperscale clusters containing hundreds of thousands of GPUs and accelerators connected through increasingly power-hungry electronic interconnects. In modern data centers, data movement—not computation—is…