State of the Market Report: AI-Driven Demand Poised to Propel Optical Communication Sector

Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is skyrocketing across all markets, from the consumer space to the enterprise space to a variety of vertical market sectors. That growth promises to impact data centers, data center interconnects (DCI s), and transport networks, as well as CSPs, ISPs, and wholesalers. The unique characteristics of AI workloads and customers impose demanding requirements on communications components, data centers, and networks that support them.

• AI workloads are computationally intensive — training ChatGPT’s GPT-4 model took about 25,000 GPUs.
• AI workloads are storage intensive — the pretraining data set for GPT-4 was 540 PB, winnowed down from 45 TB.
• AI applications require massive bandwidth, starting in the data center — having 25,000 high-performance GPUs is worthless without equally highperformance connectivity.

This represents a tremendous opportunity — and challenge — for the entire optical communications ecosystem, from chips to networks. To better understand the dynamics at work, we asked industry insiders to share their views of AI, how it’s affecting their business, what they expect from the future, and how they plan to prepare.

Download the full report below.

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