Just some news from the last few weeks:

1. Chinese develop photonic chip for artificial intelligence at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
   The pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) continuously demands higher computing performance. Despite the superior processing speed and efficiency of integrated photonic circuits, their capacity and scalability are restricted by unavoidable errors, such that only simple tasks and shallow models are realized. To support modern AGIs, we designed Taichi—large-scale photonic chiplets based on an integrated diffractive-interference hybrid design and a general distributed computing architecture that has millions-of-neurons capability with 160–tera-operations per second per watt (TOPS/W) energy efficiency. Taichi experimentally achieved on-chip 1000-category–level classification (testing at 91.89% accuracy in the 1623-category Omniglot dataset) and high-fidelity artificial intelligence–generated content with up to two orders of magnitude of improvement in efficiency. Taichi paves the way for large-scale photonic computing and advanced tasks, further exploiting the flexibility and potential of photonics for modern AGI. Science. 




2. China blocks use of Intel and AMD chips in government computers, FT reports
   China has introduced guidelines to phase out U.S. microprocessors from Intel and AMD  from government personal computers and servers, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favour of domestic options, the report said. Reuters 




3. Huawei building vast chip equipment R&D center in Shanghai
   Huawei Technologies is building a massive semiconductor equipment research and development center in Shanghai as the Chinese tech titan continues to beef up its chip supply chain to counter a U.S. crackdown.

Huawei is spending billions on a research and development base in Shanghai as part of efforts to counter a U.S. crackdown.
(Official WeChat account of Qingpu District, Shanghai Municipality)

You can certainly interpret all this as a harbinger of the Thucydides trap or not. The fact is, China is a place where things happen. And you should consider whether you can afford not to be there. Talk to us.