Akhetonics says its all-optical CPU reaches a customer in 2026
Light-based computing keeps promising more than it delivers — but one Munich startup has just put a date on its bet, and the interview laying it out is doing the rounds on Hacker News this week.
Akhetonics says it will deploy its first commercial machine with a major customer by the end of 2026, with several more planned for 2027. The company, founded by Michael Kissner and Leonardo Del Bino, is building a computer where data enters as light, is switched as light, and circulates through memory as light — with no repeated optical-to-electronic conversions on the computation path. The pitch targets AI's real bottleneck: not arithmetic, which GPUs handle in bulk, but moving weights, activations, and context between chips and memory. So the first product is deliberately not a photonic GPU — it's a "Reasoning Processing Unit" aimed at the serial, branch-heavy workloads where adding cores stops helping: automated reasoning, formal verification, combinatorial optimization, the coordination overhead an agent burns between model calls.
The technical foundation is real enough to take seriously: a peer-reviewed 2024 paper in the Journal of Lightwave Technology describing a general-purpose optical CPU architecture built on a minimal one-instruction design, plus roughly 30 fabricated chip generations since. What's missing is the evidence that would settle the argument. No published benchmark names the workload, the baseline processor, the wall-clock time, or the power draw. Kissner's headline line — "we're just 1000x-ing the frequency," from gigahertz to terahertz — is an aspiration about clock rate, not application speed; his more measured claim of 10 to 100 times faster than electronic processors on reasoning tasks remains unverified. The company has raised 6 million euros to get there. Photonic computing has a long history of impressive laboratories and unsolved memory, packaging, and economics problems — this time the deadline, not the physics, is the story.
A YouTuber built a camera that only tracks police cars — and police came to his door. Anthony Sistilli, a Canadian software engineer, built an automated license-plate reader that exclusively logs police vehicles — "a personal Flock surveillance camera to Flock the Flockers," as he called it — to demonstrate how ordinary the technology has become. Two Peel Regional Police officers visited his Brampton home on September 20, he says in a video posted October 7, and their worry was that citizens could learn where officers live and when they work — the same privacy concern residents raise about Flock Safety's network, which the company says spans more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and billions of vehicle scans a month. The asymmetry cut the way Sistilli intended: if plate data about officers is dangerous in private hands, the argument applies in both directions — as we noted when A cop searched 19,000 Flock cameras to type "LMAO".
What to watch: whether Akhetonics publishes a real benchmark — named workload, named baseline, power at the wall — before its year-end delivery claim comes due.
If a photonic CPU genuinely delivers 100x on reasoning workloads, which part of the AI stack should worry most — GPU makers, or cloud margins? Tell us in the comments.
