In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noticed that transistors – the building blocks of microchips – were shrinking. 

He predicted that every two years, the number of transistors within a chip would double, and remarkably, this prediction came true. It became known as Moore’s Law, and it drove phenomenal growth in computing power that changed the world as we know it and fuelled a vast market for computing hardware. 

As these silicon transistors got smaller, computers became faster, cheaper and more powerful. Early transistor computers in the late1950s typically held fewer than 100 transistors, the first Macintosh computer (1984) contained 68,000 transistors while an iPhone 17 (2025) has a whopping 19 billion. 

The end of computing as we know it 

The modern world is built on the results of this exponential growth, but we have hit the limits of physics when it comes to shrinking silicon. Transistors are now so tiny – just a few atoms wide – that it is impossible to shrink them further and have them operate predictably and precisely in the way that we have come to rely on.  

At the same time, a related principle – Dennard scaling, which said that as transistors get smaller their power use remains proportional to their area – has also broken down.  

The result is a phenomenon known as dark silicon: chips packed with billions of transistors that can’t all be switched on at once without overheating or drawing excessive power. 

This all marks the end of computing as we have come to know it. Energy demands from expanding data centres are surging, AI models are demanding orders of magnitude more compute, and silicon electronics are hitting hard physical and thermal limits. And all of this comes at a huge environmental cost. 

This is why we are pioneering the use of silicon photonics; computing with light, rather than electricity. 

Beyond the limits of electronic compute – silicon photonics 

Photonics (or optical computing) replaces electrons with photons to move and process data. Light travels faster, carries more information simultaneously, and produces minimal heat compared to electricity. 

By integrating photonics directly onto silicon, we combine the scalability of semiconductor manufacturing with the speed and efficiency of optics.  

This results in dramatically higher compute density, lower power consumption, and superior thermal performance, enabling us to overcome the limits that the collapse of Moore’s Law and the rise of dark silicon have imposed on conventional chips. 

Sustainable, scalable intelligence that doesn’t cost the earth it serves 

Sustainability is now one of the defining challenges of modern computing. The rapid growth underpinned by Moore’s Law has left a significant carbon footprint, and energy demands are only increasing.  

Data centres already account for nearly 3% of global electricity use, and AI workloads could double that in the next few years. Every watt saved at the chip level has a multiplier effect across the world’s digital infrastructure. 

By using light instead of current, we can deliver orders of magnitude performance gains per watt, reducing power draw and cooling requirements while enabling far greater computational throughput.  

This creates a foundation for truly sustainable AI and data processing, one that is faster, cleaner, and fundamentally scalable. 

A new class of applications 

The benefits of silicon photonics extend beyond sustainability gains. The same parallelism and efficiency that make photonic systems greener also enable new types of computing once thought impractical. 

One of these is Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a cryptographic technique that allows data to be processed securely while remaining encrypted. Typically, FHE has been confined to the lab – too computationally intensive for most practical uses. Our tech changes that, offering the computational power and energy efficiency to make this groundbreaking, privacy-preserving computing viable at scale. 

This breakthrough has far-reaching implications for sectors such as defence, finance, and healthcare, where both performance and data privacy are critical. The same principles also apply to AI acceleration, scientific modelling, and edge computing, all of which benefit from high bandwidth and low-power processing. 

Meeting the world’s demands 

As the constraints of electronic silicon become ever tighter, the global appetite for alternatives is growing fast.  

With silicon photonics, bottlenecks fall. Energy use drops. Security strengthens. The limits that held electronic compute in place no longer define what is possible.

The collapse of Moore’s law and the end of Dennard scaling do not signal an end to progress. They mark the start of a new path where light, not electrons, carries the work of the world.

We are expanding internationally to collaborate with leading research institutions, semiconductor manufacturers, and technology partners across AI, cybersecurity, and data infrastructure. Our investors and government partners stand with us as we bring this future to market.

We are proud to help lead this transformation to faster, greener, and inherently secure computing.

Now is the time to choose the future of compute. Join us to test, validate, and scale silicon photonics. Partner with us on research. Build with us in production. Invest with us to accelerate adoption. Support policies that move light based computing forward.

The future runs on light. Build it with us.