U.S. tech stocks, and the artificial-intelligence sector specifically, may be facing another competitive threat from China that could undermine faith in the market’s biggest growth driver heading into the first anniversary of the DeepSeek chatbot launch. Reports from the South China Morning Post last week said scientists from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Tsinghua University have developed a photon-based computing chip that can outperform traditional silicon-based wafers, such as those produced by Nvidia in both AI training and inferencing. Dubbed LightGen, the new chip is faster and more efficient than Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs, the report said, although its use case is tailored more toward video production and image synthesis than broader AI workloads.