Conventional semiconductor chips funnel electrons through gates, switching transistors on and off. Photonbased chips will use light, instead of electricity. Photon chips will be orders of magnitude faster, with dramatically reduced power requirements.

Yao Yang is a dean and key policy official at Peking University, one of China's most prestigious institutions. He is one of several top industry insiders who predict that China will be the first to commercialize lightbased semiconductors, leaping forward of the United States, Japan, and Europe, and in just a few years. If he is right, tens of billions of dollars in semiconductor fabrication plants will be at risk.

Also at risk are Western chipmakers who build design and build convention, electronpowered chipsets. NVidia is now the world's most valuable chip design company, now with a market capitalization of around $3 trillion. But NVidia is struggling to compete against Huawei's conventional chip in China, meanwhile other Chinese researchers have announced a lightbased chip 3,000 times faster than NVidia's best chip.

Resources and links:

Interview with Yao Yang, Chinese language (For English, open in Google Chrome or with a Firefox extension)
https://caifuhao.eastmoney.com/news/2...

Chinese team makes quantum leap in chip design with new light source
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/scien...

Beating US Sanctions, Chinese Scientists Achieve Mass Production Of Optical Chips At Low Cost
https://www.benzinga.com/news/24/05/3...

China develops new lightbased chiplet that could power artificial general intelligence — where AI is smarter than humans
https://www.livescience.com/technolog...

Largescale photonic chiplet TaiChi empowers 160 TOPS/W general artificial intelligence
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s...

Chinese scientists find a way to massproduce optical chips that the US cannot sanction
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/scien...

Chinese scientists create chip that can perform AI task 3,000 times faster than Nvidia’s A100: study
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/scien...

Exclusive: Nvidia cuts China prices in Huawei chip fight
https://www.reuters.com/technology/nv...

Nvidia Slashes AI Chip Prices As Huawei Launches China Discount War
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/nvi...

The Rising Cost of Semiconductor R&D
https://www.aalbun.com/blog/therisin...

NVidia stock chart from Finviz