Is silicon photonics actually becoming the next AI bottleneck?

Just recently, Reuters reported that Soitec is signing multi-year contracts with over 10 photonics customers due to surging AI data center demand. However, customers even have to pay deposits and commit to pricing and purchase volumes upfront, so it seems demand isn't just hype. Up until now, I've seen a lot of talk about things like GPUs, power, and memory. I don't know if optical interconnects could be another bottleneck too. The thing is LITE, COHR, CRDO, MRVL, and AVGO already went up quite a lot, so maybe people already saw this coming before I did. Source: [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/soitec-locks-customers-into-multi-year-deals-ai-wafer-demand-surges-2026-08-31/)