By Christopher McFadden
Publication Date: 2025-12-20 09:41:00
Chinese scientists have allegedly developed a series of new photonic (light-based) microchips that could outperform NVIDIA’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) graphics processing units (GPUs) by over 100x in terms of speed and efficiency.
According to claims, these new chips could easily beat out NVIDIA’s leading tech in some specific generative tasks, such as video production and image synthesis. This sounds impressive, but it is important to understand that they are not a direct replacement for NVIDIA-style GPUs for general-purpose usage.
Rather, if claims are true, of course, they represent a new computing architecture for narrowly defined AI workloads. Especially for tasks like vision and generative image creation.
NVIDIA’s GPUs (like its popular NVIDIA A100) use electrons that flow through transistors to work. This enables them to execute instructions step-by-step and has proven to be very flexible (i.e., they can run many programs at once).
However, such chips are very power-hungry and can become very hot, very quickly. They also require cutting-edge manufacturing to create.
Photons instead of electrons
These new Chinese photonic chips (like the ACCEL and LightGen) use photons instead of electrons to function. They can run calculations via optical interference, which makes the incredible fast and ultra-efficient.
However, unlike NVIDIA’s GPUs, they are relatively limited in flexibility. They can, however, be made relatively easily…
