Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Wants to Restart Moore's Law With Chips Powered by Light

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is betting on photonics: chips in which tiny beams of light carry the data. He hopes this will restart Moore's law and open the way to more powerful artificial intelligence, Wired reports. Gelsinger led Intel from February 2021 to December 2024 and gave the company more than 30 years of his career.

What Gelsinger is proposing

Gelsinger proposes replacing electrons with light where conventional silicon electronics runs into physical limits. This is silicon photonics: signals inside a chip and between chips travel not over copper traces but through optical waveguides, the "tiny beams of light" in question. Optics carries more data with less energy loss, and that, in Gelsinger's logic, can bring back the pace of growth that Moore's law set for the industry for decades.

The idea is not new. Optical fiber has long connected servers and continents. What is new is bringing light inside the computing system itself: into the chip package and onto the die. The industry sees this level as the next frontier for AI hardware.

• Pat Gelsinger was CEO of Intel from February 2021 to December 2024, and earlier served as the company's first chief technology officer
• Moore's law was formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965: the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years
• Gelsinger's new bet is photonics: transmitting data inside chips and between them using light
• After leaving Intel, Gelsinger became a general partner at the venture firm Playground Global in 2025; the firm invests in "deep tech"

Why Moore's law has stalled

Moore's law is an empirical rule that Gordon Moore laid out in 1965: transistor density doubles roughly every two years, and computing gets cheaper. In recent years the rule has worked less and less well. Each new process node costs more than the last, transistor dimensions are approaching the atomic scale, and heat output is growing faster than performance. Moore himself acknowledged during his lifetime that no exponential lasts forever.

Gelsinger knows these limits firsthand, not from textbooks: under him, Intel tried to regain technological leadership in chip manufacturing, chasing Taiwan's TSMC and South Korea's Samsung. Now, Wired writes, the former head of the company sees the next leap not in packing transistors more densely but in a shift to optics.

"Pat Gelsinger wants to pave the way to ever more powerful artificial intelligence with tiny beams of light,"

Wired says in its article.

What this has to do with AI

Training modern AI models happens in data centers on tens of thousands of accelerators, and the bottleneck is increasingly not an individual chip but the connections between chips. The larger the cluster, the bigger the share of energy and time spent moving data rather than computing. Photonic interconnects promise to remove this overhead: an optical channel carries more bits per watt than a copper one and works over longer distances without signal degradation.

Current industry leaders share the interest in photonics: the largest chipmakers and dozens of startups are running their own optical programs. For Gelsinger, who now views the industry through the eyes of a Playground Global venture investor, this is both a technological mission and a market opportunity. Whoever is first to bring photonic chips to mass production will own key infrastructure for the AI era.

What this means

If the bet on light pays off, Moore's law gets a second wind, and the computing ceiling for AI moves up without an exponential rise in energy costs. Gelsinger's voice carries weight here: when an engineer who spent three decades building conventional processors publicly bets on photonics, the industry listens.