Salience Labs Limited and Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS) announced a collaboration to develop an optical circuit switch testing environment. The partnership will be demonstrated at the OFC Conference from March 17-19 in Los Angeles.

The collaboration combines Salience Labs' silicon photonics switching platform with Keysight's testing capabilities. Keysight will showcase the testing solution at its booth during the conference, according to the companies' joint statement.

Salience Labs provides all-optical switching technology for AI datacenter infrastructure, including a 32-port silicon photonic switch. The Oxford-based company was founded in 2021 and draws on research from the University of Oxford and the University of Münster.

"AI is driving exponential growth in the datacenter market, increasing the demand for scalable networking architectures that deliver high performance, reliability, and cost efficiency," said Ram Periakaruppan, Vice President and General Manager, Network Test & Security Solutions at Keysight Technologies.

The companies cited Bain & Company research indicating AI will account for nearly half of datacenter workloads by 2030. Optical circuit switching technology aims to reduce network latency and power consumption in datacenters supporting AI workloads.

"Our suite of optical circuit solutions is transforming the networking layer of datacenters, enabling a more resilient AI infrastructure today and into the future," said Vaysh Kewada, CEO and co-founder of Salience Labs.

Keysight will integrate the optical circuit switch testing into its KAI Data Center Builder validation capabilities. The testing environment is designed to help datacenter operators validate next-generation infrastructure.