State of the Market: AI is Driving New Thinking in the Optical Industry

The year 2024 marked an inflection point for AI. In August, OpenAI’s ChatGPT reached 200 million weekly active users. Meanwhile, McKinsey reported that 72% of respondents in a business survey said that their organizations had adopted AI, compared to 55% just 10 months before. More tellingly, 55% of participants said their companies were using AI heavily, nearly double the 33% listed in the previous survey. Although these numbers are just snapshots, they capture trends across the industry and the general population that have profound implications for AI-driven network traffic — and for the optical communications industry that serves it.

In early 2024, Lightwave surveyed to explore how the optical communications ecosystem viewed the challenge of AI/ML traffic. Given the surge in AI adoption as the year has worn on, we decided to revisit the topic more granularly to understand how demands have changed and how companies are responding.

AI 2.0, our current survey, drew on a broad pool of participants from the Lightwave+BTR and Data Center Frontier's audience. Organization types included carriers, data center operators, internet content providers (ICPs), and more (see “About This Survey” at the end of this report). With annual revenues ranging from less than $1 million to over $5 billion, the companies represented various slices of the optical communications ecosystem, from startups to hyperscalers, from enterprise networks to international carriers. We had strong representation from management to provide macroeconomic insights and from all levels of engineering and R&D to shed light on the issues presented by AI/ML and technologies considered to solve them.

Download now to discover trends in AI/ML in the optical communications industry.

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