I expect the investments into AI driven mathematic discoveries that underpin compression efficiency will be a key investment area. Particularly at the data center scale rather than per device or per file level.

It's not going to be enough. The naive approach of a project I've been working on was pushing >10gbps over the local network, after a ton of work I got it back down under 1... and now it's processing so much more shit that I'm almost past 5 again! It compresses at >3:1 but the latency hit isn't suitable.

I get the impression the only reason there is renewed interest in photonics is because DCs are simply out of room (and power) to rack more servers and switches.

pi-fs will solve all our data compression problems.