The photon is doing the math now
the photon is doing the math now: shenzhen’s denali chip pushes 3.2 terabits per second with light while staying a tenth of the cost, and shanghai jiao tong’s lightgen runs full generative ai on an all-optical chip for the first time. lightelligence showed a 128-gpu optical supernode at awe 2026.
the gpu is starting to share the floor with a chip the size of a grain of salt.
Context
A Science paper from Dec 18, 2025, led by Chen Yitong at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, describes an all-optical synthesis chip for large-scale intelligent semantic vision generation. Lightelligence summarizes it, and reported coverage of its Apr 2026 IPO debut frames optical interconnect as AI's next bottleneck.
Chinadaily interviewed Lightelligence's founder in Jul 2026.
The all-optical chip from Shanghai Jiao Tong matches the Science paper, which is about vision generation, so 'full generative AI' is wider than the paper's title. The Denali chip's 3.2 terabits per second at a tenth of the cost, and a 128-GPU optical supernode at AWE 2026, were not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted.
Related work
Watch next
- Find the Denali chip announcement.
Sources
- Science, Dec 18, 2025science.org
- Lightelligence, Apr 8, 2026lightelligence.ai
- China Daily, Jul 9, 2026global.chinadaily.com.cn
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 2 October 2026 at 14:58 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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