Rochester is squarely in the path of the US-China tech war | Guest Opinion

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Having watched this city reinvent itself after Kodak‘s collapse — the startups, the university spinoffs, the quiet accumulation of imaging, optics and semiconductor expertise that nobody outside upstate New York fully appreciated — I never doubted Rochester’s resilience. But resilience isn’t the same as readiness. I spent decades watching China, arriving in Beijing in 1988 before most of Washington took it seriously, before the think tanks had their frameworks and the politicians had their talking points. What’s unfolding now isn’t a surprise. It’s a reckoning that was always coming, and it is arriving faster than most American cities — including this one — are prepared to absorb.

And Rochester is squarely in its path.

The innovation squeeze

Rochester’s tech economy runs on exactly the sectors Washington and Beijing are fighting over. The University of Rochester and RIT produce world-class research and talent in photonics, semiconductors and imaging — fields now sitting at the dead center of U.S. export control policy. Federal restrictions on sharing sensitive technology with Chinese nationals and institutions are already reshaping university research programs, limiting international collaboration and shrinking the talent pipeline that local startups depend on.

This isn’t abstract. It’s a hiring problem, a funding problem and a commercialization problem arriving simultaneously — and the institutions feeling it most acutely are the same ones Rochester has spent twenty years counting on to replace what Kodak took with it. The mitigation is equally concrete: accelerate partnerships with domestic defense primes, open alternative talent pipelines through allied nations, and treat STEM visa advocacy as an economic development priority, not a federal afterthought.

A widening conflict in the Middle East adds another variable — defense procurement accelerates, which benefits Rochester’s optics and photonics sector, but energy and materials costs rise with it, tightening the margins that make supply chain reinvestment possible in the first place.

The Kodak lesson, revisited

Rochester rebuilt around precision optics and advanced imaging. That expertise feeds defense contractors, medical device makers and a cluster of photonics startups doing genuinely important work. But the components, materials and manufacturing partnerships that make that ecosystem viable are deeply entangled with Chinese supply chains. Semiconductor fabrication, specialty optics, precision coatings — the dependencies run deeper than most local executives want to admit, and admitting them is the first step toward doing something about it.

Decoupling sounds clean in a Washington policy brief. On the ground, it means higher costs, longer lead times and harder choices about market accessibility. Companies that commission supply chain exposure audits now — before the next regulatory tightening forces the issue — will have options that late movers simply won’t. The companies that survive this transition will be those that mapped their exposure early and moved before they were forced to.

What Rochester can’t afford to ignore

Great-power rivalry is forcing clarity no one asked for. The research partnerships that seemed routine five years ago now carry legal and reputational risk that university counsel are only beginning to quantify. The Chinese graduate students filling critical STEM roles at U of R and RIT are navigating visa uncertainty that has nothing to do with their talent or their contributions to this community — and when they leave, they take irreplaceable expertise with them. The startups trying to commercialize university research are finding that their investor universe just got smaller, their regulatory exposure just got larger and their timeline to market just got longer.

Rochester has rebuilt before — after Kodak, after Xerox, after every wave of disruption that was supposed to finish this city off. It has earned the right to confidence. But confidence without clear-eyed assessment is just nostalgia with better branding.

The window for smart positioning is open but narrowing fast. Domestic semiconductor supply chains need anchor partners with proven manufacturing culture and precision capabilities — Rochester has both. Defense-aligned photonics is a growth sector actively looking for exactly the depth this region has spent decades building. Research partnerships that don’t carry geopolitical exposure are becoming a competitive advantage in themselves, and universities that can offer that cleanly will win talent and funding that more entangled institutions lose. These are real opportunities, not theoretical ones — but only for cities that move decisively before the policy environment hardens further and the choices narrow from strategic to merely reactive.

The new cold war isn’t being fought in distant capitals. It’s being fought in university labs, startup pitch rooms and factory floors. Including some right here. The question isn’t whether Rochester will be affected. It’s whether the people running this region’s institutions will treat that as a threat to manage or an opening to seize.

Shannon Roxborough is a Rochester-based freelance journalist, geopolitical analyst and publisher of the China Executive Intelligence Brief. He has covered on U.S.–China relations, international business and global markets for more than three d