Introducing Scale1
Our first photonic network switch
Scale1 is LightScale's first photonic network switch, built to turn the platform into a concrete interconnect product for AI infrastructure.
It is the first switch built for Hyperlane, our topology-on-demand network architecture, with a focus on faster data movement, lower communication overhead, and more adaptive connectivity across bandwidth-heavy workloads.
Latency reduction
The switching path is designed to reconfigure at packet cadence, fast enough to change topology within a collective operation, not just between runs. The goal is to make connectivity changes cheap enough to use inside the data path, not as a slow control-plane action layered on top of it.
Hyperlane · topology on demand
Topology, routing, and link assignment are exposed to the control plane. Operators can match fabric shape to workload patterns (training, inference serving, MoE routing) and feed congestion and link-health signals back into reconfiguration decisions in real time.
Non-thermal switching
Scale1 uses a non-thermal photonic switching matrix, integrated at the device level rather than assembled from discrete optical components. It is designed to scale switch radix without the thermal load or per-port power overhead of conventional reconfigurable optics.
| Model | Port count | Status |
|---|---|---|
| SXNR-001-64 | 64 × 64 | Pilot |
|
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| SXNR-001-128 | 128 × 128 | Coming soon |
| SXNR-001-256 | 256 × 256 | Coming soon |
| SXNR-001-384 | 384 × 384 | Coming soon |
| SXNR-001-512 | 512 × 512 | Coming soon |
| SXNR-001-768 | 768 × 768 | Coming soon |
AI infrastructure is hitting a communications wall
The bottleneck
Compute scaled; the network didn't. As clusters grow it's data movement, not FLOPs, that holds them back; at a hundred thousand GPUs, the network alone runs to tens of megawatts.
What has to change
A faster version of the same thing won't close the gap. The interconnect has to move more data per joule, and reshape itself as fast as the workload does.
Why light needed a new switch
Every alternative falls short
Thermo-optic, carrier-injection, MEMS, liquid crystal, piezoelectric: each trades speed for heat, loss, or moving parts. None reaches GHz switching at femtojoule energy.
Set the state with a field
A gate voltage charges a capacitor and the field flips the optical state: energy stored and recovered, not burned. Designed for roughly 1,000× lower switching energy than today's silicon photonic switches.
Any-to-any, one optical pass
Any input reaches any output with no electrical conversion in between, and the path holds until the fabric is reprogrammed.