In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year to reach 65 000 by 1975. When that remarkable prediction proved true, he revised the doubling rate to every two years, and that became known as Moore's Law. Almost 50 years after Moore's seminal prediction, traditional chip architectures are reaching their technological, practical and economical limits. The EU-funded POLLOC project is exploiting an all-optical approach that takes us beyond current transistor technology. By replacing electrons with photons, optical transistors and all-optical logic gates are envisaged that could bypass the fundamental limitations of the current electronic transistors. Moreover these novel devices offer processing at the speed of light to achieve energy-efficient massive processing required for tomorrow’s high-efficiency and high-power computing platforms.