In signing a letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce, pure-play foundry GlobalFoundries (GF) will accelerate its R&D of next-generation silicon photonics with $300 million in funding through the CHIPS and Science Act.
Under the deal, the U.S. will receive equity from GF, representing about 1% ownership in the company.
The funds will be used to advance future optical materials, wafer technologies and advanced packaging for silicon photonics, a technology critical to current and future AI infrastructure. Additionally, the funding will be used for 3D hybrid bonding technologies that will allow for near-packaged optics (NPO) and co-packaged optics (CPO), considered to be the future in data center interconnects.
GF said the work builds on its recently introduced Silicon Photonics Co-Packaged Advanced Light Engine (SCALE) platform that aims to achieve 400 Gb/s performance and a five times increase in energy efficiency over current implementations.
“Silicon photonics is essential to AI infrastructure,” said Tim Breen, CEO of GF. “For a decade, the industry talked about the shift from copper to optical as something that was coming — today it is here, moving data at higher bandwidth and improved power efficiency as workloads grow more complex.”
Growing silicon photonics portfolio
GF has been ramping up its support for silicon photonics over the last year and a half.
In November 2025, GF acquired Advanced Micro Foundry (AMF) to create what it claims to be the largest pure-play silicon photonics foundry. The AMF acquisition not just expands GF’s silicon photonics portfolio but increases its production capacity and R&D in Singapore.
GF said silicon photonics is essential for AI infrastructure and as data continues to move faster and workloads become more complex, moving data at greater speeds, precision and power efficiency will be critical to future data centers and telecom networks.
In June 2026, GF signed a deal with Sivers Semiconductors AB to develop silicon photonics for AI infrastructure materials. This gives the foundry a laser source for the technology for a range of optical connectivity options.
Why it matters
Growth in data centers involves AI clusters scaling to hundreds of thousands — maybe even millions in the future — of graphics processing units (GPUs). All these devices are moving data between chips using traditional electrical connections.
Currently, this is being done via copper wiring, but these data centers are hitting a wall as copper draws too much power and creates too much heat and latency.
Silicon photonics uses light instead of electricity to move data, so it is faster and doesn’t heat up racks the way copper does.
As a result, we are seeing companies, specifically foundries, develop platforms to meet the anticipated demand for silicon photonics that will likely be a focal point for hyperscalers.
