Silicon photonics won’t matter in the datacenter “anytime soon,” according to Broadcom CEO Hock Tan.

On the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call on Thursday, a financial analyst asked Tan if Broadcom feels customers are ready to adopt the technology, which improves network speeds and performance by bringing optical communication deeper into computing infrastructure. Operators of AI infrastructure need fast networks to carry the massive quantities of data they process, meaning interest in technologies that speed things up is high.

“I can see a point in time in the future when it matters as the only way to do it,” Tan responded, before saying, “We are not quite there yet.”

Indeed, the CEO thinks two waves of innovation need to play out before silicon photonics becomes necessary. The first is s

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