Swinburne Spinout Microcomb Launches to Cut AI Data Centre Energy Use With Optical Chips
A new spinout from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne is taking aim at one of the biggest costs of the AI boom: the energy needed to move data around inside data centres. Microcomb officially launched on October 30, and Swinburne says it is the first company in Australia to bring optical microcomb technology to market and one of the first anywhere to apply it to data centres.
The technology builds on research published in Nature. An optical microcomb is a chip about the size of a fingernail that turns a single laser colour into a rainbow of laser light, splitting it into many channels that can each carry data. Conventional optical links use many separate lasers to create those channels, which takes significant power for the lasers and detectors. Professor David Moss, director of Swinburne’s Optical Sciences Centre and a co-founder, said the small chip can slot into a fibre link without large components or major upgrades.
Moss said AI data centres rely on many servers working together as one large computer, which multiplies the connections, fibre and data movement that all draw power. In the university’s announcement he described energy as the huge bottleneck facing the industry and said the sector is reaching a crisis point that money and extra power alone will not solve.
What it means in practice
Microcomb brings together Moss, Bill Corcoran from Monash University and Arnan Mitchell from RMIT University, with support from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Optical Microcombs. It has pre-seed investment from Innovation Victoria through its University Innovation Platform, alongside Swinburne Ventures, and has started building a demonstrator shaped by feedback from potential customers in AI infrastructure and photonic communications.
Energy has become the pressure point for AI infrastructure in Australia. Federal Labor reportedly plans to ban AI data centres near homes and tie them to renewables, while big campuses keep coming, including Anthropic’s advanced talks to anchor AirTrunk’s Kurri Kurri campus. Any part that moves more data per watt eases pressure on grid connections and power bills, though photonic chips still face a long road from the lab to production racks.
What to watch next is when the demonstrator is ready, which operators agree to trial it, and whether Microcomb raises a larger seed round that keeps engineering and manufacturing in Victoria.