While there are stringent performance criteria, as well as competition from resonant and non-resonant semiconductor quantum dot materials, organic materials, and other glass systems, nanometer dimension metal particle glass composites have some properties that may make them viable candidates for all optical switching networks: large third order nonlinear response, picosecond switching and relaxation times, thermal and chemical stability, high laser damage threshold, and low two photon absorption. Metal nanocluster composites can be fabricated by ion implantation. It has been shown that particle size can be controlled by the total dose, current density, and substrate temperature. The depth of the implanted particles can be controlled by the implantation energy. The formation and size of these colloids when formed by ion implantation are highly dependent upon the composition of the substrate. Post implantation processing can subsequently be used to alter the size and size distribution of the colloids. Sequential ion implantation can be used to extend the ion implantation method of forming metal nanocluster glass composites by allowing the formation of multi-component particles in glass. This technique has been demonstrated to significantly alter the composition of the metal particles formed. As a consequence the formation of multi-component nanoclusters results in changes in both the linear and nonlinear optical properties of the composite that are not possible with single element colloids. Here we review the formation and optical properties of multi-component nanoclusters formed by sequential implantation in silica compared to their single element counterparts. In this paper we focus on work done by the authors on the following systems; Ag/Sb, Ag/Cu and Ag/Cd.