INDUSTRY NEWS
Brightspeed launches 8-gig fibre for AI businesses
Aylight raises €4.5M to reinvent AI chip lasers
Fibre builder Brightspeed expanded its fibre portfolio with the launch of its 8 Gig speed tier, providing organisations with the network infrastructure needed to support increasingly data-intensive, AI-powered operations. “AI is fundamentally changing how businesses work and it’s changing what businessowners should expect from their network,” said Jeff Lowney, president of Brightspeed Business. “From AI assistants and intelligent automation to cloud collaboration, real-time analytics and connected workplaces, today’s businesses are generating and moving more data than ever before, and connectivity has evolved from a utility to strategic infrastructure. Brightspeed Business 8 Gig
Swiss photonic chip developers Aylight has announced that it has
fibre offering delivers the performance, reliability and flexibility businesses need to build for the future.” AI workloads continuously access cloud-based models, process large datasets and generate high volumes of simultaneous network traffic. These workloads require faster download speeds and greater capacity. Additionally, business owners want lower latency and consistent performance across their increasingly connected organisations. “Our goal isn’t simply to offer faster internet,” Lowney added. “We’re building the digital infrastructure that enables businesses to confidently adopt AI, innovate faster and scale without limits. As technology continues to evolve, our network is built to evolve with it.”
supply for AI data centres — a public signal that moving data between chips, rather than raw compute, increasingly limits how far AI infrastructure can scale. Today each optical link requires its own laser, and that approach does not reach the throughput that data centres will demand. “We started from a problem, not a technology: the laser had become one of the real limits on how far AI can scale,” said Bahareh Marzban, co-founder and CEO of Aylight. “What convinced me was seeing something first demonstrated for a completely different application and realizing it was the answer — so we translated it into a new kind of laser built for AI data centres.
raised €4.5m in a pre-seed funding round to accelerate the development of chip- scale multiwavelength lasers – tackling one of the key bottlenecks limiting the scaling of artificial intelligence. The funding round – co- led by Elaia and Swisscom Ventures with participation from Verve Ventures and Plug and Play – will take Aylight’s laser from a research result to first prototypes, manufactured in a semiconductor foundry. It also lets Aylight expand its R&D team. In March 2026, Nvidia committed $4 billion across Coherent and Lumentum to secure advanced laser and optical-interconnect
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ISSUE 44 | Q3 2026
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