Kaiam, a manufacturer of advanced data center optical transceivers with manufacturing in Livingston, Scotland, entered into financial administration on December 24. The company gave redundancy notices to 312 staff on Christmas Eve.
Kaiam, which was founded in 2009, use silicon micro-mechanical techniques to solve the challenging transceiver manufacturing step of single-mode alignment and attachment. The company supplies multi-wavelength single-mode products, such as its 100G-CWDM4 QSFP28 transceivers. Kaiam has previously announced 400G products on its roadmap.
The Daily Record reports that government officials were made aware of the company’s precarious financial situation more than a month earlier.
Kaiam builds optical transceiver reserve as a hedge against US-China trade war
Kaiam, a leading manufacturer of advanced data center optical transceivers, has initiated a strategic transceiver reserve program to protect U.S. and European data centers from the effects of the incipient US-China trade war.
The company said the need for a reserve supply of optical transceivers arises because of the broad tariffs recently enacted by the Trump administration, which could impede the importation of Chinese-made optical transceivers into the United States. Kaiam notes that U.S. cloud data centers are largely dependent on this supply of Chinese-made transceivers, making them vulnerable to collateral damage from the increasingly turbulent US-Chinese relationship.
Kaiam is a vertically-integrated manufacturer based in Newark, California with large-scale manufacturing in Livingston, Scotland.
