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.

“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.

Today, I’ve shifted my focus from optics for autonomous vehicles to optical networking for AI infrastructure. And once again, technology companies are confronting infrastructure that was built for a different era. Rather than wait for traditional power and telecommunications providers to catch up, they are taking the problem into their own hands.

That is the shift that matters. The companies building artificial intelligence are no longer just customers of infrastructure. They are beginning to become infrastructure companies themselves.

Just as they did during the autonomy race, the technology companies aren’t waiting for the traditional infrastructure industries to solve the problem.

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