The AI infrastructure race: I’ve seen this movie before

Back in 2022, when the auto industry was fixated on autonomous vehicles, I was cofounder and chief technology officer at Luminar, where our lidar technology was helping enable the next generation of self-driving cars. Speaking at an automotive conference, I remarked how exciting it was to have a front-row seat to one of the most significant technological transformations in the industry’s history. Afterward, an automotive executive pulled me aside. “Jason,” he said, “you don’t have a front-row seat. You’re part of the show. What you’re doing for autonomy, and how you’re forcing us to think, is exactly what’s needed.” That conversation stayed with me ever since, because it captured something larger than autonomous driving. When an industry is being transformed by technology, the companies that built the old infrastructure are not always the ones that define the new one. In autonomy, some of the companies that pushed furthest were technology companies like Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox; not the automakers that had dominated transportation for a century. I believe we are watching the same pattern emerge again. Today, I’ve shifted my focus from optics for autonomous vehicles to optical networ…

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