TORONTO, Ontario, January 6, 2021 – POET Technologies Inc. (“POET” or the “Company”) (TSX Venture: PTK; OTCQX: POETF), the designer and developer of the POET Optical Interposer and Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) for the data center and tele-communication markets, today announced that it has entered into development and supply agreements with a technology leader in photonic neural network systems for Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications.

The chipset market for AI applications is projected to grow from approximately $18 billion in 2020 to over $65 billion by 2025.  POET’s new development and supply agreement for photonic AI computing represents an entry point into this new large and extremely high-growth market.  POET’s customer for these applications is breaking the digital semiconductor mold by integrating photonics into accelerators for AI workloads, thereby enabling step-change advancements in AI computation.  Harnessing light to perform data-parallel calculations is many orders-of-magnitude faster, more power efficient, and lower cost than in traditional semiconductors.  Photonic computing changes the game in the field of Artificial Intelligence.