Watch All Shows Victor Davis Hanson Tony Kinnett Daily Signal Signal Sitdown

Watch All Shows Victor Davis Hanson Tony Kinnett Daily Signal Signal Sitdown

Home – Political News – China Controls a Crucial Piece of the US AI Pipeline

China Controls a Crucial Piece of the US AI Pipeline

China has infected every part of our internet stack. From our telecoms to our routers, we are in the midst of a full-scale invasion. But it’s not just your home services that are adversely impacted, because the data centers running every AI trained model are particularly vulnerable.  

Why? China owns an essential device that every AI model trained in America depends on. They’re called optical transceivers. These devices turn electrical signals into light, which lets servers “talk” to each other over fiber inside a data center and between data centers. 

For AI, these transceivers are essential to build AI clusters, which are a group of computers linked together to train and run large artificial intelligence systems expeditiously. Optical transceivers are critical to their operation. As one publication put it, “A single unstable optical link can trigger disruptive link flaps that derail AI training runs resulting in loss of time, resources, and money.”

Herein lies the rub: Beijing controls almost all of our optical transceivers.

Indeed, three companies make optical transceivers at scale. One is the American firm Coherent. The other two are Chinese: InnoLight and Eoptolink. Smaller players include Lumentum in the U.S., plus Source Photonics and Fast Photonics, both of which have deep ties to China. InnoLight and Eoptolink alone supply roughly two-thirds of the optical transceivers in U.S. data centers.

Worse, American hyperscalers are funding China’s invasion. Google Capital led the company’s $38 million Series C round, its first investment in China. InnoLight named Google as its “largest........

© The Daily Signal