The AI Buildout Demands a New Kind of Fiber. YOFC Is Building It.
Billions are pouring into AI chips and data centers, but the fiber optic cables connecting them can't keep up. One manufacturer thinks redesigning fibers from scratch is the answer.
AI has a fiber problem. Billions of dollars are going into chips and data centers, but the fiber optic lines connecting them are hitting physical limits that haven't changed in 40 years.
Every time someone asks ChatGPT a question, a voice assistant processes a command, or a trading algorithm executes, that request travels to a data center, gets processed, and comes back. This happens billions of times a day, and it's growing fast. Gartner predicts AI will consume 50% of cloud computing resources by 2029, up from under 10% now.
Traditional fiber will struggle to keep up. It can't handle the massive surge in AI traffic. If these AI investments are going to pay off, the fibers themselves need to be redesigned from scratch.
Yangtze Optical Fibre and Cable Joint Stock Limited Company, known as YOFC, thinks it has an answer. The Chinese company is one of the world's largest fiber optic manufacturers, having laid 1.2 billion kilometers of fiber in over 100 countries.
"Without next-generation optical fiber networks, AI infrastructure will be unable to handle the massive surge of data required for digital and intelligent transformation across industries," said Dan Zhuang, YOFC's executive director and president.
Last June, the company unveiled its AI-2030 strategy, a plan to accelerate next-generation optical technologies through innovation and global partnerships. A key focus is a fundamentally different type of fiber: hollow-core fiber.
In a regular fiber optic cable, data travels through a glass core. The problem is that glass slows light and causes signal loss over distance. Hollow-core fiber swaps the solid glass core with a hollow tube. The core is mostly air, and since light moves faster through air than through glass, signals arrive more quickly. Simple physics. YOFC says the result is a 31% reduction in latency.
Signals in hollow-core fiber travel much farther with less attenuation. Standard fiber requires amplifiers roughly every 80 kilometers to maintain signal strength. YOFC says its hollow-core fiber loses just 0.040 dB/km, compared to a theoretical limit of 0.14 dB/km for glass. Fewer amplifiers means lower costs and reduced power consumption. In addition, the maximum drawing length of YOFC’s single hollow-core fiber preform reaches 91.2 kilometers, setting a global benchmark.
"Hollow-core fiber outperforms traditional fiber on nearly every metric—attenuation, bandwidth and latency," said Zhuang. "Hollow is infinite."
This technology is already in the ground. YOFC has more than 10 projects running on live networks in China and abroad, including all three of the country's major carriers.
Hollow-core fiber is already gaining early traction in finance. In 2025, China Mobile launched the country's first commercial route, linking the Shenzhen-Hong Kong financial markets. China Telecom runs a 100-kilometer link between securities data centers in Dongguan and Hong Kong, with signals crossing in under a millisecond. China Unicom operates a cross-border connection linking a submarine cable landing station, a data center, and a trading hub, cutting latency by 32%.
YOFC says scaling up industrialization is the next priority. But scaling any new fiber technology brings challenges: cost, engineering deployment, maintenance, and building out the wider industrial ecosystem.
To address this, YOFC has launched a new industry initiative at MWC26 in Barcelona. Members include industry peers from Japan and Europe, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The goal, according to YOFC, is to speed up commercial deployment and expand the supplier base.
"We have developed all the critical raw materials for hollow-core fiber in-house," said Zhuang. "But now we need to work with partners worldwide to scale deployment and turn this from a proven technology into global infrastructure."
YOFC expects the market to grow quickly. Beyond AI, Zhuang sees demand from 6G networks, quantum computing, smart cities, and high-frequency trading — anywhere microsecond delays have financial or operational implications.
With demand growing, what matters now is building production capacity to meet it. Backed by eight production sites in six nations, YOFC, which has laid 1.2 billion kilometers of traditional fiber, is confident in its ability to deliver strong performance going forward.
