LightOn is grounded in foundation R&D for AI, including innovative hardware
LightOn OPU: Photonic computing for Machine Learning at scale
We developed photonic computing hardware (Optical Processing Units – OPUs) of interest to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and HPC.
LightOn’s photonic computing technology boosts some generic tasks in Machine Learning such as training and inference of high-dimensional data. It can be used in the context of supervised and unsupervised learning, with batch processing or streaming data.
- OPUs are highly integrated with CPUs and GPUs so that it boosts their respective performance.
- OPUs can be seamlessly accessed through an Open Source Python API called LightOnML, available here: https://github.com/lightonai/lightonml
- Benchmark code to compare the performance of CPU and GPU with our OPU are available on Github
- Our white paper on hardware is available at this location.
- The hardware FAQ is available here at this location.
The OPU is the first large-scale hybrid digital / analog computing platform for AI.

Photonic Quantum Computing
LightOn Qore quantum photonic processors are all versatile, powerful, and low-loss platforms designed for the rapidly growing field of NISQ (Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum) computing.