Lightelligence Launches 128-Card Optical GPU Link

On April 28, 2026, Lightelligence’s shares opened at 183.2 Hong Kong dollars and closed their first day at 886, up 383.62%. Behind the market drama, the company was making a quieter commercial turn: in March, it launched the 128-card Optical Jumper with Shanghai INESA, Biren Technology and ZTE, targeting multi-thousand-card GPU clusters.

The move puts light between GPUs rather than asking light to replace them. Lightelligence’s PACE and Xizhi Tianshu cards are optoelectronic hybrids: electronic chips handle storage and control, while an optical chip performs dense matrix multiplication, the most concentrated part of some AI workloads. The company says Xizhi Tianshu integrates more than 40,000 photonic devices.

The technology has posted striking laboratory numbers, but they do not settle the product question. A 2025 Nature paper reported 5-nanosecond latency for one iteration of an Ising problem, nearly 500 times faster than an A10 GPU. Optical systems still struggle to store data, analog computation faces noise, and algorithms must be adapted, so the result does not establish that GPUs can be replaced.

The commercial signal is stronger in connectivity. In 2025, optical interconnect revenue reached 84.28 million yuan, compared with 22.09 million yuan for optical computing, making interconnect 79.2% of total revenue. For customers operating large GPU systems, keeping processors from waiting on data offers a more immediate use case than rebuilding their computing stack.

So, concretely, Lightelligence is offering a way to attack bandwidth congestion while preserving the GPUs customers already operate. Whether that becomes a durable business is less settled: revenue grew from 38.24 million to 60.19 million to 106 million yuan from 2023 to 2025, while gross margin fell from 60.7% to 39.0% and adjusted net loss reached 271 million yuan in 2025.