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Tower Semiconductor and Salience Labs partner for mass production of data center optical switches
Wednesday, February 25, 2026 at 10:08 PM
Tower Semiconductor and Salience Labs have established a partnership to mass produce large-scale optical switch circuits designed for next-generation data centers.
Context
Salience Labs and Tower Semiconductor have transitioned into the pre-production phase of a strategic partnership to manufacture Photonic Integrated Circuit-based optical circuit switches. These switches are designed to alleviate the massive bandwidth and latency bottlenecks currently straining AI data centers. By leveraging Tower Semiconductor’s high-volume silicon photonics platforms, which integrate advanced lasers and low-loss nitride waveguides, Salience Labs aims to move connectivity directly into the optical domain to bypass traditional electrical processing limits.
This transition is pivotal as data center spending for AI-related network switches is projected to exceed $100 billion by 2030. Optical circuit switching provides a critical solution to the power crisis in AI infrastructure, with the potential to reduce networking energy consumption by up to 79% compared to traditional architectures. With the first industrialized units entering pre-production in February 2026, the companies are scheduled to showcase their at-scale deployment readiness at the OFC 2026 conference in March.
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