The most powerful artificial intelligence processing core operates with light and bears the Greek stamp. The Department of Informatics at Aristotle University, following the creation of the fastest artificial intelligence processor it developed and announced about two years ago, presents a photonic artificial intelligence processor that offers the highest computing power ever recorded worldwide in the category of fully programmable processing cores!

This processor is based on photonic neurons and operates with light instead of electricity, implementing an original architecture which, for the first time, can perform algebraic operations at high speeds by utilizing multiplexing in three dimensions: time, space, and wavelength. In this way, it has managed to provide a total computing power equal to 262 TOPS (262 × 1012 operations per second), which is a record number among all programmable Artificial Intelligence cores: it is approximately 24 times higher than the corresponding performance of other research prototypes of fully programmable photonic processors and approximately 10 times higher than NVIDIA’s most powerful artificial intelligence core (tensor core) B200.

The Aristotle University research aims to solve one of the most significant current problems in the field of photonic processors, which is their ability to support large Artificial Intelligence models.

The pioneering research in this field was based on the interdisciplinary collaboration of two research teams from the Department of Informatics: the Wireless and Photonic Systems and Networks research team (WinPhoS, http://winphos.web.auth.gr/ ) of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki’s KEDEK, with Professor Nikos Pleros as scientific director, and the Computational Intelligence and Deep Learning research group of the Department of Informatics (CIDL Research group, https://cidl.csd.auth.gr/ ), with Professor Anastasios Tefas as scientific director and Associate Professor Nikolaos Passalis of the Department of Chemical Engineering as key collaborator.

It is worth noting that the principal investigator, Mr. Christos Pappas, was recently recognized for this research by the IEEE Photonics Society as one of the top 10 doctoral candidates worldwide for the year 2025, and received the 2025 Photonics Society Graduate Student Scholarship award, while Dr. Apostolos Tsakyridis was invited to present the results of this research at the World Optical Communications Conference in March 2026 in Los Angeles, USA.

The collaboration between the two Aristotle University research teams has attracted significant funding from a number of European Horizon and national research programs, as well as from the American start-up company Celestial AI, which is based in Silicon Valley, California, and was recently acquired by Marvell.

More Information: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0271374