Making Light Work of It
James Stewart | March 1, 2026
Imperial Academy’s Student Body President Caleb Flory gave an Imperial Science Society current event on February 12, 2026, about how tech companies are experimenting using light to compute information.
He started off by asking the club this question: “When you think of light, what first comes to mind?” He received a multitude of answers, but he turned the club’s attention to computers.
He brought up how two companies, “Lightelligence” and “Lightmatter,” have created new processors using light. These processors will solve problems faster and with less energy consumption than normal computers. Flory quoted Anthony Rizzo a photonic engineer and Dartmouth College, said, “These processors can do the things we care about, and they can do it better than the electronic chips we already have.” Light has already been used to move data in fiber optic cables but not to compute anything.
These new photonic composers are doing math. They use light to do matrix multiplications used in AI and other forms of computing. This is important because AI is growing more complex, and computers need more power to properly run it. Flory brought up Moore’s Law (discovered by Gordon Moore in 1965), which is that the transistors on a microchip double every two years.
However, Moore’s Law is no longer valid, and electronic chips are not getting much better. Photonic computing could be a viable solution.
The only problem is less-than-perfect accuracy. Light can take on a large range of values (which differs from the current mode of ones and zeros) because of its large spectrum. These are making thousands of light reflections per second, bending the light and transforming it into strings of ones and zeros that the computer translates into what we see. This can result in some errors.
Flory ended with the quote from the CEO of Lightmatter, saying this is a real computer.