The Wall Every AI Data Center Is Quietly Hitting (Vivek Raghunathan)

We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories · Oct 1, 2026 · 57m

Every major AI training operation is quietly running into the same wall: the speed at which silicon can move data between chips. Every new GPU cluster a hyperscaler adds makes the problem more expensive.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Vivek Raghunathan of Xscape Photonics — the deep-tech company spun out of Columbia University research to attack the bandwidth bottleneck at GPU-to-GPU and GPU-to-memory interfaces inside AI data centers. Xscape's core platform is a scalable multi-color laser system: custom silicon photonics built for…