Photonic computing company Lightmatter unveiled Guide DR, a liquid-cooled laser network interface card (LNIC) that will help to scale co-packaged optics (CPO).

Lightmatter said the modular LNIC has been designed to support high-bandwidth optical interconnects, including Lightmatter’s own Passage L20 offering, which was released in March.

By relocating the light source from the faceplate into the chassis, Lightmatter said the Guide DR LNIC solves the faceplate scaling bottleneck that will increasingly be caused by front-panel pluggable external lasers in AI data centers.

Built to OCP Nic 3.0 dimensions, the company further claimed that the LNIC quadruples optical power density when compared to conventional external laser small form-factor pluggables (ELSFPs), supporting up to 51.2 Tb/s of aggregate CPO or near-packaged optics (NPO) scale-up bandwidth, with four Guide DR modules able to support up to 204.8 Tb/s of CPO scale-up switching bandwidth in a single one rack-unit (RU) switch tray.

“With Guide DR, we are removing the physical barriers to next-generation AI infrastructure by delivering the foundational laser innovation required to scale co-packaged optics,” Lightmatter CEO Nick Harris noted. “As the industry scales from 200G (200 Gb/s) ports to beyond, traditional light source solutions are hitting a wall. By integrating a high-density, liquid-cooled light source into a standard NIC form factor within the chassis, we unlock the massive optical power necessary for next-generation interconnects in a single one RU footprint. This architecture enables the system-level reliability hyperscale operators require, while maintaining the modularity the industry expects.”

California-based Lightmatter specializes in photonics-enabled technologies that use light instead of electrical signals for computing, meaning its chips don’t experience the same heat or resistance as traditional chip architectures. Its Passage L20 is the successor to the company’s Passage M1000 and L200 offerings, which were launched in April 2025.

Samples of Lightmatter’s Guide DR LNIC will be available later this year.