By South China Morning Post
Publication Date: 2025-12-19 00:19:00
Chinese scientists have unveiled an optical computing chip that outperformed Nvidia’s leading AI hardware by over a hundredfold in speed and energy efficiency – particularly for generative tasks such as video production and image synthesis.
The LightGen chip was developed by a team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Tsinghua University, harnessing the speed of light to execute complex artificial intelligence workloads.
With more than 2 million photonic neurons integrated into a compact chip, LightGen can generate high-resolution images, including 3D scenes, and create videos.
The research, led by Professor Chen Yitong from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, was published in the journal Science on Friday.
Chen said LightGen could be “further scaled up” and added: “It provides a new way to bridge the new chip architectures to daily complicated AI without impairment of performance and with speed and efficiency that are orders of magnitude greater, for sustainable AI.”
