Xi Jinping lands in Washington for a state visit today, but as Bloomberg sums up the mood in one line: the two leaders "may find common ground on AI safety, but neither is willing to give ground in the technology race." And right on schedule, the FT reports that Beijing has started counting Broadcom switches.
According to the FT, China's State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), which oversees the country's state-owned companies, has spent recent weeks surveying how much Broadcom switching gear is installed in state-controlled data centres. The count came back... high: "The survey found that the penetration rate of Broadcom switches among state-owned companies could be as high as 90 per cent, one of the people said."
The exercise supports Beijing's "domestic chips for domestic use" campaign. The initial findings could lead SASAC to issue "informal guidance" telling state data centres to cut back on Broadcom. In Beijing, informal guidance tends to carry the weight of a formal order.
Why switches, and why now
Switches get little attention in the AI boom, but they decide whether 10,000 accelerators work together as one training cluster or sit around as 10,000 very expensive heaters. Broadcom's merchant Ethernet silicon dominates that layer worldwide. Nvidia and Huawei also sell high-end switches in China, but Nvidia is already barred from state-backed data centers. That leaves Broadcom as the last major American supplier embedded in China's state AI build-out.
SASAC is also looking at how Broadcom sells, n
