Executive Summary:
- The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has gone from a single pilot production line to a string of headline breakthroughs in photonics technology since 2024. Beijing has framed progress by researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) as a way around U.S. chip sanctions.
- Photonic chips, which move information using light rather than electricity, are faster, run cooler, and—crucially for Beijing—do not depend on the cutting-edge factory equipment that the United States has blocked the PRC from buying.
- PRC labs are at or near the global frontier in several photonic research benchmarks, but the United States and Taiwan still dominate the parts of the photonic supply chain that turn lab demonstrations into viable, scalable products.
On April 3, several major Chinese labs jointly announced “LightIN,” a new type of experimental photonic computer chip (Ying Zhu et al., March 14). [1] Photonic chips, unlike conventional chips, uses light to process information. This enables faster and more efficient data processing, as light travels faster than electricity, generates much less heat, and can carry multiple signals at once via different parts of the spectrum. Photonic chips therefore can move and process information at much higher speeds while consuming a fraction of the energy (Nature, December 23, 2015).
Within weeks of the research being published, state media in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had spotlit LightIN. One government website declared that the breakthrough “injected strong ‘photonic power’ into the development of the digital economy” (为数字经济发展注入强劲的“光子动力”) (CCTV, April 3; Department of Economy and Information Technology of Hubei Province, April 6). Beyond the hype, the LighIN project is a reminder that PRC labs are shifting toward building general-purpose photonic computing platforms rather than just one-off experiments. Such breakthroughs can complicate U.S. approaches to technology controls, as they rely on technologies not currently addressed by existing policies.
Bypassing Bottlenecks for AI Advances
Photonic chips are particularly well suited to two jobs: shuttling enormous volumes of data between artificial intelligence (AI) processors in data centers and performing the kinds of repetitive mathematical calculations that drain the most power on conventional chips. Importantly, they can be fabricated without the most advanced factory equipment, as performance depends on how cleverly their light pathways are designed, not on cramming switches into ever-smaller spaces. Photonics therefore provides a potential solution to the obsolescence of Moore’s Law, which characterized the exponential growth of processing power for over 60 years (Synopsys, June 30, 2024).
Since 2015, the PRC has made photonic technology a national priority. The 14th Five-Year Plan designated it a strategic technology, directing funding toward national labs from agencies such as the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Natural Science Foundation and establishing dedicated research and development programs. This allowed for long-term capability-building rather than immediate commercialization (China Brief, July 12, 2024). The possibility of “leapfrog development” in chip design has driven Beijing’s strategic obsession with photonics over the last decade. This has accelerated since U.S. restrictions on advanced chipmaking machines arrived in 2022, as photonic chips offer a way to sidestep the U.S.-imposed bottleneck by providing alternative efficiency gains through technological solutions that obviate the need for advanced equipment.
The technology has garnered top-level industry support. In June 2025, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei (任正非) sat for a rare front-page interview with the People’s Daily. Ren acknowledged that the PRC is still “one generation behind the United States” (还是落后美国一代) in conventional chips, but argued that the country could close the gap by “compensating for physics with mathematics, for Moore’s Law with non-Moore approaches, and for single-chip limitations with group computing” (用数学补物理、非摩尔补摩尔，用群计算补单芯片) (People’s Daily, June 10, 2025). Photonics is the most concrete “non-Moore” bet on the table. Huawei underscores this through a decisive move, appointing of Dr. Martin Schell, a leading photonic expert from Germany, as Head of R&D at its Prague Research Center (Baijiahao, April 4). The pattern seen across other industries is now repeating in photonics. Government money has followed: a National Natural Science Foundation roadmap, a National Key Research and Development Program, and a new State Key Laboratory dedicated to photonic materials all sit behind the recent push.
Lab Breakthroughs yet to Translate to Applications
The PRC plausibly leads in photonic patents, as well as in certain published benchmarks. An early milestone came in 2024 with the arrival of the country’s first dedicated photonic chip pilot factory in Wuxi: The Chip Hub for Integrated Photonics Xplore (CHIPX; 光子芯片研究院). Run by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in June 2025 it announced that it had produced the PRC’s first batch of six-inch photonic chip wafers and began mass production of high-speed chips operating at world-class speeds. State media framed the moment as a leap from “technology follower” (技术跟跑) to “industrial leader” (产业领跑) in high-end optical components (IT Home, June 6, 2025; People’s Daily, June 7, 2025).
Other universities have provided additional breakthroughs. A team at Tsinghua University has created two variants of a photonic chip, which they call Taichi (太极) I and II. Taichi II could train AI models using light alone, sidestepping the standard approach used for training Western models (Tsinghua, April 10, 2024; Tencent News, August 8, 2024; The China Academy, August 12, 2024). Chinese media even claimed Taichi II could perform with roughly 1,000 times more energy efficiency than Nvidia’s flagship H100 graphics chip, which should be further scrutinized (Baijiahao, September 2, 2024), More recently, researchers at Fudan University unveiled a photonic chip that they claimed could process data inside an AI cluster at significant speeds (IT Home, March 12, 2025; Science Net, March 13, 2025). A team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM; 上海光机所), meanwhile, unveiled Meteor-1 (流星一号), advertised as the world’s first “ultra-high parallel” optical chip, capable of running calculations simultaneously on different colors of light (SIOM, June 17, 2025; CAS, June 25, 2025).
These breakthroughs put the PRC near the global frontier, yet laboratory achievements are yet to translate into viable products. They have no domestic customer queue and limited foundry production slots. By contrast, Nvidia has announced that it will start shipping photonic networking switches in 2026 that offers higher bandwidth and data throughput compared to the Fudan University team’s chip. This device is co-developed with TSMC and built into the same product family that already trains most of the world’s frontier AI models, and will likely find cloud buyers like longtime partners Microsoft and Meta (Nvidia, March 18, 2025; TrendForce, March19, 2025). Samsung, meanwhile, has unveiled a roadmap to fabricating photonics AI chips by 2029 (The Elec, March 30).
Conclusion
Photonics developments could complicate Washington’s strategy of denying Beijing access to the most advanced chip manufacturing technology. If Chinese researchers can extract similar performance from photonics chips as from traditional semiconductors, U.S. export controls will lose much of their efficacy. Any future restrictions would have to target a very different set of inputs, such as specialty crystals, lasers, and design software, that have not been studied in depth.
Two years ago, CHIPX was an aspiration; today, it is shipping wafers, and four other PRC institutions have produced credible photonic computing advances. A decade of state-driven efforts have begun to pay off. Beijing has not yet caught up with Nvidia or TSMC where it matters most—inside the world’s working AI data centers—but it is no longer obvious that the United States can keep the PRC permanently behind by controlling lithography and GPU technology alone. The next phase of the technology contest will be fought less in nanometers than in wavelengths of light.
Notes
[1] Zhu Ying, Liu Yifan, Yang Xinyu, Liu Kailai, Hua Xin, Luo Ming, Liu Jia, Chang Siyao, Yan Jie, Zhang Shengxiang, Wu Miao, Wang Zhicheng, Zhang Hongguang, Wang Dong, Chen Daigao, Xiao Xi, and Yu Shaohua. “LightIN: a versatile silicon-integrated photonic field programmable gate array with an intelligent configuration framework for next-generation AI clusters.” Light, science & applications. (2026) 15:165. 10.1038/s41377-026-02209-5.
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