China is hanging a new AI threat over Nvidia and America’s other chip giants that could undermine faith in Wall Street’s biggest growth driver, much like it did only a year ago with the DeepSeek chatbot launch. Scientists at universities in Shanghai and Beijing have developed a photon-based computing chip for artificial-intelligence training and inferencing that can outperform traditional silicon-based wafers, such as those produced by Nvidia the South China Morning Post reported. 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 for video production and image synthesis than broader AI workloads.