As AI data centers strain land and power resources, hollow core fiber could enable a geographically distributed infrastructure. Artificial intelligence infrastructure is fundamentally changing the physical requirements of optical fiber networks. This feature first appeared in issue 57 of DCD Magazine. Rooted in the photonic-crystal. One of these technologies that was highlighted at Microsoft Ignite in November was hollow core fiber (HCF), an innovative optical fiber that is set to optimize Microsoft Azure's global cloud infrastructure, offering superior network quality, improved latency and secure data transmission. HCF. AI workloads (training and inference) demand increasing computational throughput, which requires faster communication at different network layers: scale-up, scale-out, and scale-across. 3 focuses on developing PMDs that are reaching 200G/lane and perhaps even 400G/lane this decade.