KOPN/SBLX demo microLED optical interconnect

Moving data between artificial-intelligence chips is becoming as hard as the computing itself. Kopin and Fabric.AI said Tuesday they are building a microLED optical link to replace copper inside AI data centers. (kopin.com) (markets.businessinsider.com) Copper traces are the short electrical paths that shuttle bits between processors, boards and racks. They work well over short distances, but signal loss, heat and power rise as links get faster and longer. (microsoft.com) (networkworld.com) Optical links send those bits as light instead of electricity, like swapping a metal wire for a tiny flashlight. Traditional optical systems usually rely on lasers and complex electronics that add cost and power draw. (microsoft.com) (networkworld.com) MicroLEDs are tiny light emitters better known from display screens. Kopin and Fabric.AI said they can repurpose programmable microLED pixels as bidirectional transceivers that both send and receive data. (kopin.com) (publicnow.com) The companies call the product Neural I/o. They said it is aimed at GPU-to-GPU, board-to-board and rack-to-rack communications in what Fabric.AI calls “AI factories,” or data centers built to train and run large models. (kopin.com) (markets.businessinsider.com) The concrete part of Tuesday’s announcement was the commercial arrangement. Fabric.AI said it placed a $15 million purchase order with Kopin to fund a demonstration chipset, and Kopin said it will be the exclusive manufacturer. (kopin.com) (finance.yahoo.com) Kopin also said it owns 19.9% of Fabric.AI. Fabric.AI separately said it raised $21.5 million in a private placement and plans to change its Nasdaq ticker to FABC on April 29, 2026. (kopin.com) (stocktitan.net) The idea is not appearing in a vacuum. Microsoft Research published MOSAIC in 2025, a microLED optical design that argued copper links are efficient but usually limited to under 2 meters, while conventional optics reach farther at higher power cost. (microsoft.com) Microsoft’s paper described a “wide-and-slow” architecture that uses many parallel low-speed channels instead of a few very fast ones. That approach used directly modulated microLEDs rather than lasers and was framed as a way to cut link energy in future data-center networks. (microsoft.com) (networkworld.com) Kopin and Fabric.AI did not disclose shipping dates, production volumes, link speeds or power-per-bit figures for Neural I/o in Tuesday’s releases. For now, the announcement is a funded development program built around a demo chipset and a claim that microLED optics can move into mainstream AI infrastructure. (kopin.com) (markets.businessinsider.com)