China has moved to slow the outflow of engineering talent to the US.
Bloomberg reports that China is bringing in sweeping travel restrictions for AI engineers working at strategically important outfits including Alibaba and DeepSeek.
The restrictions are due to come into force on 15 September. They would require explicit approval from the Chinese government before engineers can travel abroad.
The move looks like a response to the US Federal Communications Commission, which is weighing a ban on China-sourced optical transceivers.
Those transceivers convert electrical signals into light pulses through an LED. At the other end of a fibre optic cable, they turn incoming light back into electrical signals through a photodiode.
China, meanwhile, is building massive AI data centres in the deserts of Inner Mongolia.
The region’s plentiful solar power helps cut the cost of running those data centres, which sounds cheaper than Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk’s wheeze of putting AI data centres in low Earth orbit.
