On February 18, 2025, the President of CIR, Lawrence Gasman, made a presentation at a Webinar on the topic of “Optical Transceivers in the Age of AI: Impacts, Challenges, and Opportunities,” organized by Lightwave. His presentation can be found at
Lawrence’s talk covered how the Data Center is changing to cover the rise of AI. He called for the industry to remember its past, specifically (1) not to overstate the potential revenue from new technology and (2) the honored tradition in the telecom industry of re-using older technology. With these maxims in mind, Lawrence presented a realistic ten-year forecast of the AI market and showed how that would impact expectations for the AI data center market. With regard to (2) he predicted that the AI data center infrastructure would continue to be dominated by Ethernet (Ultra Ethernet) and noted that co-packaged optics CPO).
He said that further down the road Ethernet would surely give way to a CPO-like infrastructure based on infrastructure and quantum processors may be a more efficient way to power AI data centers, but that time was some ways off. In the meantime, he claimed that data center engineers should do everything to make their AI data centers more efficient. This might be as futuristic as using small language models (SLMs) instead of LLMs or as “obvious” as using traditional approaches to improved supply chain management in the AI data center.
