The semiconductor industry is not a competitive landscape but a hierarchy of control. From design to fabrication to acceleration, value concentrates in the layers that define, constrain and allocate compute across the global economy.
Berkshire Hathaway is often seen as a collection of companies. In reality, it operates as a system of infrastructure assets — railroads, energy grids and networks that form the invisible backbone of the economy and enable long-term capital compounding.
As AI systems expand, the limiting factor is shifting from compute to power—redefining how and where technological leadership is built.
As AI systems scale, the real constraint is no longer compute but connectivity. At OFC 2026, photonics—and specifically chip packaging—emerges as the critical layer enabling performance, efficiency and scalability, positioning the Netherlands as a strategic player in global AI infrastructure.
Artificial intelligence is often described as a software revolution, but beneath the algorithms lies a deeper transformation. From chips and photonics to energy systems and infrastructure, the future of intelligence is increasingly shaped by physics and the physical architecture of computing.
As artificial intelligence pushes data centers to unprecedented scale, the real bottleneck is shifting from compute to connectivity. Silicon photonics—using light instead of electricity—could redefine how AI systems move data, enabling the ultra-fast networks required for the next generation of hyperscale infrastructure.
As AI systems grow to unprecedented scale, computation is no longer the primary constraint — communication is. NVIDIA’s multibillion-dollar bet on optical technologies signals a historic shift from copper to light, redefining the physical infrastructure that will determine how far artificial intelligence can advance.
Artificial intelligence is no longer a weightless software story. As capital markets confront energy constraints, grid bottlenecks and front-loaded infrastructure costs, AI is being repriced as heavy industry — where scarcity, not scalability, determines power and valuation.
We believed artificial intelligence would be a contest of code — faster models, larger datasets, smarter architectures. But the decisive battles of the coming decade are unlikely to be fought inside neural networks. They will unfold in substations, cooling plants, transmission corridors and the mud of construction sites. The constraint is no longer how much intelligence we can design, but how much physical reality we can sustain.
Artificial intelligence appears weightless, yet it runs on energy-hungry machines nearing physical limits. As moving data becomes costlier than computing it, engineers are turning from electrons to photons. This shift toward light-based hardware may determine the scalability, economics, and geopolitics of AI.
