AI seen as driving further growth at Hong Kong fibre optics start-up Cloud Light after acquisition by US firm
- Cloud Light Technology CEO Dennis Tong anticipates multiple years of 50 per cent growth as AI drives up demand for faster data centre resources
- The 6-year-old manufacturer of fibre-optic transceivers was acquired in November by Lumentum for US$750 million
The 6-year-old start-up is a manufacturer of fibre-optic transceivers, a device used in data centres to transmit data over fibre optic cables. The company was acquired last November by US networking equipment giant Lumentum for US$750 million.
Part of the appeal of the company’s hardware – which it manufactures in Dongguan, in China’s southern Guangdong province, and Southeast Asia – is a global AI boom that has brought greater demand for higher bandwidth and computing power, Cloud Light founder and CEO Dennis Tong told the South China Morning Post in an interview on May 17.
“When we talk about AI and machine learning, most of us think of Jensen Huang standing on the stage holding a GPU chip,” Tong said, referring to the founder and CEO of semiconductor juggernaut Nvidia, which makes the powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) on which the AI industry has come to rely for training models.
“What not all of us realise is … that tremendous computing power, it’s not enabled by one single chip. It’s actually enabled by connecting hundreds of these chips together,” Tong said. “That’s our product, the interconnect product.”
Cloud Light has been growing revenue at about 50 per cent annually for the last three years, according to Tong, who said he thinks the company will “continue to do so for at least a few more years”.
The firm brought in US$200 million in revenue in the 12 months through October last year, San Jose-headquartered Lumentum said in a November statement announcing its acquisition of Cloud Light.
The acquisition will give Cloud Light “a bigger platform for faster growth”, according to Tong. Through Lumentum, it now has a much bigger sales force in North America and access to a manufacturing facility in Thailand, he said.