Salience Labs ships 32-port all-optical silicon photonic switch for AI datacenters

Salience Labs has announced availability of an all-optical 32-port silicon photonic switch aimed at the networking layer of AI data center infrastructure. The company says the switch is designed to improve network latency, throughput, and reliability metrics while lowering power consumption, and that it’s the first product in a planned portfolio of optical circuit switch (OCS) systems.

The 32-port system is positioned as the initial step in a roadmap that also includes 64- and 128-port technologies for higher-capacity deployments. Salience Labs says its “fully integrated switch architecture” is intended to be compatible with existing transceivers and infrastructure, and to scale to connect thousands of GPUs across multiple racks for both scale-up and scale-out network performance.

On claimed performance and form factor, Salience Labs lists several target metrics for the product line: eliminating the need for optical transceivers with “savings up to 8X on power versus current OEO switching solutions,” reducing overall network latency and removing tail latency (with “up to 80% improvement in Tokens per Second / User”), and supporting “latest data-rates” that have been tested at up to 200G using 100 Gbaud PAM4 encoding. The company also says the switch fits into “a fraction of the 1RU footprint,” which matters for designs where front-of-rack space is already contested by higher-speed optics, cabling, and increasingly dense compute.

Optical circuit switching is typically used to create deterministic optical paths without doing electronic packet processing at each hop. That can shift the engineering trade space for AI fabrics where tail latency and power budgets are under pressure, but it also raises practical questions around topology, control-plane integration, and how operators will segment workloads across reconfigurable optical paths. Salience Labs’ core claim here is that it can deliver optical switching in a way that slots into existing data center infrastructure without forcing a transceiver refresh.

“Optical switching is moving networks from electronic packet routing to highly predictable, energy-efficient optical connectivity,” said Vaysh Kewada, CEO and co-founder of Salience Labs. “We are transforming the networking layer, unlocking the ability to extend scale-up and scale-out networks across the datacenter.”

The announcement also highlights collaborations with Tower Semiconductor and Keysight Technologies. Dr. Ed Preisler, Vice President and General Manager of RF Business Unit at Tower Semiconductor, said Tower’s work with Salience focuses on photonic integrated circuits (PIC)-based optical OCS “built on Tower’s … Silicon Photonics platform,” with an emphasis on scaling “from development to high-volume production.” Ram Periakaruppan, Vice President and General Manager of Network Test & Security Solutions at Keysight, said the companies are showcasing an optical circuit switch test using Keysight AI Data Center Builder to demonstrate bandwidth efficiency and latency improvements for AI workloads.