"but even those fall short of what I think is happening here."

I have similar thoughts  timotao.

“The surge in demand for our Photonic Fabric is the product of having the right technology, the right team and the right customer engagement model”, said Dave Lazovsky, Co-Founder and CEO of Celestial AI.  “We are experiencing broad customer adoption resulting from our full-stack technology offerings, providing electrical-optical-electrical links that deliver data at the bandwidth, latency, bit error rate (BER) and power required, compatible with the logical protocols of our customer’s AI accelerators and GPUs. Deep strategic collaborations with hyperscale data center customers focused on optimizing system-level Accelerated Computing architectures are a prerequisite for these solutions. We’re excited to be working with the giants of our industry to propel commercialization of the Photonic Fabric.”

To accelerate customer adoption of the memory and compute fabric, Celestial AI is cultivating a Photonic Fabric ecosystem. These tier-1 partnerships consist of custom silicon/ASIC design services including Broadcom, system integrators, HBM and packaging suppliers including Samsung.

https://www.celestial.ai/blog/celestial-ai-announces-photonic-fabric-adoption-by-lead-hyperscaler-customers

Credit to sugarmaple:

Celestial AI will make their fortune on optical interconnects.

POET will make you a fortune providing the light to do that.

Celestial AI alone will get us there, but they are not our only customer either.

POET provides a disruptive packaged light source that is passively flip-chipped onto the POET Optical Interposer platform and needs no additional optical alignments after mounting on Celestial's boards.

POET will be managing the data flow among Celestial's AI chips using standardized wavelength and power specifications of lasers that are used in AI. POET is developing products that adhere to CW-WDM MSA specifications as we are a member.

We have no direct competition for what we are providing to Celestial.

We await information regarding the pricing of Starlight but we are not giving it away.

Celestial will be huge and POET will be right there with them.