Why it matters: A technological leap in fiber optics has shattered previous limitations, achieving what experts once considered impossible: transmitting data at 1.02 petabits per second – enough to download every movie on Netflix 30 times over – across 1,808 kilometers using a single fiber no thicker than a human hair. At the heart of this breakthrough – driven by Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Sumitomo Electric Industries – is a 19-core optical fiber with a standard 0.125 mm cladding diameter, designed to fit seamlessly into existing infrastructure and eliminate the need for costly upgrades. Each core acts as an independent data channel, collectively forming a "19-lane highway" within the same space as traditional single-core fibers. Unlike earlier multi-core designs limited to short distances or specialized wavelength bands, this fiber operates efficiently across the C and L bands (commercial standards used globally) thanks to a refined core arrangement that slashes signal loss by 40% compared to prior models. The experiment's success relied on a complex recirculating loop system. Signals traveled through an 86.1-kilometer fiber segment 21 times, simulating a cross-continental journey equivalent to linking Berlin to Naples or Sapporo to Fukuoka. To maintain integrity over this distance, researchers deployed a dual-band optical amplification system, comprising separate devices that boosted signals in the C and L bands. This enabled 180 distinct wavelengths to carry data simultaneously using 16QAM modulation, a method that packs more information into each pulse. // Related Stories At the receiving end, a 19-channel detector, paired with advanced MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) processing, dissected interference between cores, much like untangling 19 overlapping conversations in a crowded room. Schematic diagram of the transmission system This digital signal processor, leveraging algorithms developed over a decade of multi-core research, extracted usable data at unprecedented rates while correcting for distortions accumulated over 1,808 km. The achievement caps years of incremental progress. In 2023, the same team achieved 1.7 petabits per second, but only across 63.5 km. Earlier efforts using 4-core fibers reached 0.138 petabits over 12,345 km by tapping the less practical S-band, while 15-mode fibers struggled with signal distortion beyond 1,001 km due to mismatched propagation characteristics. The new 19-core fiber's uniform core design sidesteps these issues, achieving a capacity-distance product of 1.86 exabits per second per kilometer – 14 times higher than previous records for standard fibers. Image diagram of 19-core optical fiber. Presented as the top-rated post-deadline paper at OFC 2025 in San Francisco, this work arrives as global data traffic is projected to triple by 2030. While challenges remain, such as optimizing amplifier efficiency and scaling MIMO processing for real-world use, the technology offers a viable path to petabit-scale networks. Researchers aim to refine production techniques for mass deployment, potentially enabling transoceanic cables that move entire data centers' worth of information hourly. Researchers aim to refine production techniques for mass deployment, potentially enabling transoceanic cables that move entire data centers' worth of information hourly. Sumitomo Electric's engineers, who designed the fiber's coupled-core architecture, note that existing manufacturing lines can adapt to produce the 19-core design with minimal retooling. Meanwhile, NICT's team is exploring AI-driven signal processing to further boost speeds. As 6G and quantum computing loom, this breakthrough positions fiber optics not just as a backbone for tomorrow's internet, but as the central nervous system of a hyperconnected planetary infrastructure.

Editor's take: The University of Arizona could become the birthplace of the world's first petahertz-speed transistor. If successful, this research work could mark the dawn of a new era in computing, where the speed of light, rather than electricity, sets the pace for innovation. A team of scientists has unveiled a breakthrough that could one day propel computers to operate at speeds millions of times faster than today's most advanced processors. The discovery, led by researchers at the University of Arizona and their international collaborators, centers on harnessing ultrafast pulses of light to control the movement of electrons in graphene – a material just one atom thick. The research, recently published in Nature Communications, demonstrates that electrons can be made to bypass barriers almost instantaneously by firing laser pulses lasting less than a trillionth of a second at graphene. This phenomenon, known as quantum tunneling, has long intrigued physicists, but the team's ability to observe and manipulate it in real time marks a significant milestone. Mohammed Hassan, an associate professor of physics and optical sciences at the University of Arizona, explained that this advance could usher in processing speeds in the petahertz range – over a thousand times faster than the chips powering today's computers. Such a leap, he said, would transform the landscape of computing, enabling dramatic progress in fields ranging from artificial intelligence and space research to chemistry and health care. Hassan, who previously led the development of the world's fastest electron microscope, worked alongside colleagues from the University of Arizona, the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Their initial focus was studying how graphene conducts electricity when exposed to laser light. Typically, the symmetrical structure of graphene causes the currents generated on either side to cancel each other out, resulting in no net current. However, the team made a surprising discovery after modifying the graphene samples. They observed that a single electron could "tunnel" through the material – and that this fleeting event could be captured in real time. This unexpected result prompted further investigation and ultimately led to the creation of what Hassan calls "the world's fastest petahertz quantum transistor." // Related Stories To achieve this, the scientists used a commercially available graphene phototransistor, enhanced with a special silicon layer. They exposed it to a laser switching on and off at an astonishing rate of 638 attoseconds – each attosecond being one quintillionth of a second. The result was a transistor capable of operating at petahertz speeds, a feat previously considered far beyond reach. Unlike many scientific breakthroughs that require highly controlled laboratory environments, this new transistor functioned in everyday, ambient conditions. This opens the door for the technology to be adapted for commercial use and integrated into future generations of electronic devices. Hassan and his team are now working with Tech Launch Arizona to patent and commercialize their invention. Their next goal is to develop a version of the transistor that operates using standard, commercially available lasers, making the technology more accessible to industry partners.

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Google’s new AlphaEvolve shows what happens when an AI agent graduates from lab demo to production work, and you’ve got one of the most talented technology companies driving it. Built by Google’s DeepMind, the system autonomously rewrites critical code and already pays for itself inside Google. It shattered a 56-year-old record in matrix multiplication (the core of many machine learning workloads) and clawed back 0.7% of compute capacity across the company’s global data centers. Those headline feats matter, but the deeper lesson for enterprise tech leaders is how AlphaEvolve pulls them off. Its architecture – controller, fast-draft models, deep-thinking models, automated evaluators and versioned memory – illustrates the kind of production-grade plumbing that makes autonomous agents safe to deploy at scale. Google’s AI technology is arguably second to none. So the trick is figuring out how to learn from it, or even using it directly. Google says an Early Access Program is coming for academic partners and that “broader availability” is being explored, but details are thin. Until then, AlphaEvolve is a best-practice template: If you want agents that touch high-value workloads, you’ll need comparable orchestration, testing and guardrails. Consider just the data center win. Google won’t put a price tag on the reclaimed 0.7%, but its annual capex runs tens of billions of dollars. Even a rough estimate puts the savings in the hundreds of millions annually—enough, as independent developer Sam Witteveen noted on our recent podcast, to pay for training one of the flagship Gemini models, estimated to cost upwards of $191 million for a version like Gemini Ultra. VentureBeat was the first to report about the AlphaEvolve news earlier this week. Now we’ll go deeper: how the system works, where the engineering bar really sits and the concrete steps enterprises can take to build (or buy) something comparable. 1. Beyond simple scripts: The rise of the “agent operating system” AlphaEvolve runs on what is best described as an agent operating system – a distributed, asynchronous pipeline built for continuous improvement at scale. Its core pieces are a controller, a pair of large language models (Gemini Flash for breadth; Gemini Pro for depth), a versioned program-memory database and a fleet of evaluator workers, all tuned for high throughput rather than just low latency. A high-level overview of the AlphaEvolve agent structure. Source: AlphaEvolve paper. This architecture isn’t conceptually new, but the execution is. “It’s just an unbelievably good execution,” Witteveen says. The AlphaEvolve paper describes the orchestrator as an “evolutionary algorithm that gradually develops programs that improve the score on the automated evaluation metrics” (p. 3); in short, an “autonomous pipeline of LLMs whose task is to improve an algorithm by making direct changes to the code” (p. 1). Takeaway for enterprises: If your agent plans include unsupervised runs on high-value tasks, plan for similar infrastructure: job queues, a versioned memory store, service-mesh tracing and secure sandboxing for any code the agent produces.  2. The evaluator engine: driving progress with automated, objective feedback A key element of AlphaEvolve is its rigorous evaluation framework. Every iteration proposed by the pair of LLMs is accepted or rejected based on a user-supplied “evaluate” function that returns machine-gradable metrics. This evaluation system begins with ultrafast unit-test checks on each proposed code change – simple, automatic tests (similar to the unit tests developers already write) that verify the snippet still compiles and produces the right answers on a handful of micro-inputs – before passing the survivors on to heavier benchmarks and LLM-generated reviews. This runs in parallel, so the search stays fast and safe. In short: Let the models suggest fixes, then verify each one against tests you trust. AlphaEvolve also supports multi-objective optimization (optimizing latency and accuracy simultaneously), evolving programs that hit several metrics at once. Counter-intuitively, balancing multiple goals can improve a single target metric by encouraging more diverse solutions. Takeaway for enterprises: Production agents need deterministic scorekeepers. Whether that’s unit tests, full simulators, or canary traffic analysis. Automated evaluators are both your safety net and your growth engine. Before you launch an agentic project, ask: “Do we have a metric the agent can score itself against?” 3. Smart model use, iterative code refinement AlphaEvolve tackles every coding problem with a two-model rhythm. First, Gemini Flash fires off quick drafts, giving the system a broad set of ideas to explore. Then Gemini Pro studies those drafts in more depth and returns a smaller set of stronger candidates. Feeding both models is a lightweight “prompt builder,” a helper script that assembles the question each model sees. It blends three kinds of context: earlier code attempts saved in a project database, any guardrails or rules the engineering team has written and relevant external material such as research papers or developer notes. With that richer backdrop, Gemini Flash can roam widely while Gemini Pro zeroes in on quality. Unlike many agent demos that tweak one function at a time, AlphaEvolve edits entire repositories. It describes each change as a standard diff block – the same patch format engineers push to GitHub – so it can touch dozens of files without losing track. Afterward, automated tests decide whether the patch sticks. Over repeated cycles, the agent’s memory of success and failure grows, so it proposes better patches and wastes less compute on dead ends. Takeaway for enterprises: Let cheaper, faster models handle brainstorming, then call on a more capable model to refine the best ideas. Preserve every trial in a searchable history, because that memory speeds up later work and can be reused across teams. Accordingly, vendors are rushing to provide developers with new tooling around things like memory. Products such as OpenMemory MCP, which provides a portable memory store, and the new long- and short-term memory APIs in LlamaIndex are making this kind of persistent context almost as easy to plug in as logging. OpenAI’s Codex-1 software-engineering agent, also released today, underscores the same pattern. It fires off parallel tasks inside a secure sandbox, runs unit tests and returns pull-request drafts—effectively a code-specific echo of AlphaEvolve’s broader search-and-evaluate loop. 4. Measure to manage: targeting agentic AI for demonstrable ROI AlphaEvolve’s tangible wins – reclaiming 0.7% of data center capacity, cutting Gemini training kernel runtime 23%, speeding FlashAttention 32%, and simplifying TPU design – share one trait: they target domains with airtight metrics. For data center scheduling, AlphaEvolve evolved a heuristic that was evaluated using a simulator of Google’s data centers based on historical workloads. For kernel optimization, the objective was to minimize actual runtime on TPU accelerators across a dataset of realistic kernel input shapes. Takeaway for enterprises: This clarity allows the agent to self-improve and demonstrate unambiguous value. 5. Laying the groundwork: essential prerequisites for enterprise agentic success While AlphaEvolve’s achievements are inspiring, Google’s paper is also clear about its scope and requirements. The primary limitation is the need for an automated evaluator; problems requiring manual experimentation or “wet-lab” feedback are currently out of scope for this specific approach. The system can consume significant compute – “on the order of 100 compute-hours to evaluate any new solution” (AlphaEvolve paper, page 8), necessitating parallelization and careful capacity planning. Before allocating significant budget to complex agentic systems, technical leaders must ask critical questions: Machine-gradable problem? Do we have a clear, automatable metric against which the agent can score its own performance? Compute capacity? Can we afford the potentially compute-heavy inner loop of generation, evaluation, and refinement, especially during the development and training phase? Codebase & memory readiness? Is your codebase structured for iterative, possibly diff-based, modifications? And can you implement the instrumented memory systems vital for an agent to learn from its evolutionary history? Takeaway for enterprises: The increasing focus on robust agent identity and access management, as seen with platforms like Frontegg, Auth0 and others, also points to the maturing infrastructure required to deploy agents that interact securely with multiple enterprise systems. The agentic future is engineered, not just summoned AlphaEvolve’s message for enterprise teams is manifold. First, your operating system around agents is now far more important than model intelligence. Google’s blueprint shows three pillars that can’t be skipped: Deterministic evaluators that give the agent an unambiguous score every time it makes a change. Long-running orchestration that can juggle fast “draft” models like Gemini Flash with slower, more rigorous models – whether that’s Google’s stack or a framework such as LangChain’s LangGraph. Persistent memory so each iteration builds on the last instead of relearning from scratch. Enterprises that already have logging, test harnesses and versioned code repositories are closer than they think. The next step is to wire those assets into a self-serve evaluation loop so multiple agent-generated solutions can compete, and only the highest-scoring patch ships.  As Cisco’s Anurag Dhingra, VP and GM of Enterprise Connectivity and Collaboration, told VentureBeat in an interview this week: “It’s happening, it is very, very real,” he said of enterprises using AI agents in manufacturing, warehouses, customer contact centers. “It is not something in the future. It is happening there today.” He warned that as these agents become more pervasive, doing “human-like work,” the strain on existing systems will be immense: “The network traffic is going to go through the roof,” Dhingra said. Your network, budget and competitive edge will likely feel that strain before the hype cycle settles. Start proving out a contained, metric-driven use case this quarter – then scale what works. Watch the video podcast I did with developer Sam Witteveen, where we go deep on production-grade agents, and how AlphaEvolve is showing the way: Daily insights on business use cases with VB Daily If you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. We give you the inside scoop on what companies are doing with generative AI, from regulatory shifts to practical deployments, so you can share insights for maximum ROI. Read our Privacy Policy Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here. An error occured.