Lightmatter Names Roy Kim Vice President of Product to Lead Global Deployment of Photonic Interconnects

Google, AMD, and NVIDIA veteran brings 15+ years of AI infrastructure product leadership to scale Lightmatter's Passage™ and Guide™ platforms

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Lightmatter, the leader in photonic (super)computing, today announced the appointment of Roy Kim as Vice President of Product. Kim brings more than 15 years of AI infrastructure product leadership from Google, AMD, and NVIDIA, and will lead Lightmatter's product strategy as the company scales its Passage™ photonic interconnect platform and Guide™ VLSP light engine from landmark industry firsts to volume deployment across the world's most advanced AI data centers.

"Co-packaged optics is moving from proof of concept to production, and the products and partnerships that land in the next 18 to 24 months will define the AI data center for the decade that follows," said Nick Harris, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Lightmatter. "Roy has built and shipped the products that defined AI infrastructure at three of the most consequential silicon companies in the industry. There isn't a better person to lead Lightmatter into this phase."

Kim joins Lightmatter from Google, where he has served as Director of AI Infrastructure Product Management since 2021, leading product strategy for the company's large-scale AI infrastructure initiatives. Prior to Google, he spent nearly three years at AMD leading Data Center GPU Product Management, and eight years at NVIDIA driving product development across AI and HPC. The combination gives Kim a rare, end-to-end view of how hyperscale AI infrastructure is designed, built, and deployed. At Lightmatter, he will own the company's product roadmap and lead product management, marketing, and strategy.

"The interconnect bottleneck is the single greatest limiter to AI progress today," said Roy Kim, Vice President of Product at Lightmatter. "Over the past decade, I have watched customers struggle with this infrastructure constraint which slowed down their critical AI initiatives. Photonics is the breakthrough that shatters this wall, and Lightmatter is the only company that has proven it at the scale the industry now demands. I'm excited to join this world-class team to deliver products that will power the next decade of AI."

Kim joins during the most productive stretch in Lightmatter's history. In January, the company introduced Guide™, the industry's first Very Large Scale Photonics (VLSP) light engine, capable of powering 51.2 Tbps of bandwidth per laser module and now sampling with customers. In March, Lightmatter expanded its Passage™ portfolio with the L20, a 6.4 Tbps optical engine for near-package optics (NPO) and on-board optics (OBO) that cuts fiber count in half through bidirectional multiplexing. L20 will also be made available in the XPO form factor, with Lightmatter as a founding member of the XPO consortium. The company also unveiled vClick™ Optics, a first-of-its-kind detachable fiber array unit that delivers less than 1.5 dB insertion loss and removes a critical scaling barrier for 3D co-packaged optics in next-generation XPUs and switches.

About Lightmatter

Lightmatter® is leading a revolution in AI data center infrastructure, enabling the next giant leaps in human progress. The company's groundbreaking Passage™ platform—the world's first 3D-stacked silicon photonics engine—and Guide®—the industry's first VLSP™ light engine—connect thousands to millions of processors. Designed to eliminate critical data bottlenecks, Lightmatter's technology delivers unprecedented bandwidth density and energy efficiency for the most advanced AI and high-performance computing workloads, fundamentally redefining the architecture of next-generation AI infrastructure. Visit www.lightmatter.co to learn more.

Lightmatter, Passage, Guide and VLSP are trademarks of Lightmatter, Inc. Any other trademarks or registered trademarks mentioned in this release are the property of their respective owners.