GlobalFoundries has secured a planned $300 million award from the U.S. Department of Commerce to accelerate research and development of silicon photonics technology.
The move is aimed at strengthening domestic semiconductor capabilities and addressing one of the biggest bottlenecks in next-generation artificial intelligence infrastructure, namely network throughput.
The funding was announced Wednesday as a letter of intent under the CHIPS Research and Development Office. It will support development of advanced optical interconnects that use light over fiber rather than electrical signals over copper wire to move data between chips.
A key focus of the initiative is co-packaged optics, which integrates optical communications directly to AI processors. This is necessary to address constraints in AI clusters because so much data is being moved around.
The award will accelerate GF’s development of next-generation silicon photonics wafer technologies, novel optical materials and advanced packaging, including proven 3D hybrid bonding, that enable the roll-out of near-packaged optics (NPO) and co-packaged optics (CPO).
This work builds directly on GF’s recently introduced SCALE (Silicon Photonics Co-Packaged Advanced Light Engine) platform, targeting industry-leading modularity, 400Gb/s performance and a 5x increase in energy efficiency over current-generation implementations.
“The CHIPS R&D incentives will support a breakthrough in compute and communication networks moving past traditional copper bottlenecking to power next-generation AI,” Bill Frauenhofer, executive director for semiconductor innovation and investment at the Department of Commerce, said in a statement. “Accelerating R&D for domestic photonics capabilities and advanced packaging provides American industry the extreme bandwidth and energy efficiency to scale complex AI workloads securely and rapidly.”
The award adds to previous federal support for the company. In 2024, GlobalFoundries received approximately $1.5 billion in CHIPS Act funding to expand manufacturing operations in New York and Vermont.
GlobalFoundries was formed in 2009 when AMD spun off its fabrication plants as a standalone business and went fabless. Although technically an American company, GlobalFoundries is 77% owned by Mubadala Investment Company of Abu Dhabi. It has facilities in New York, Vermont, and Dresden, Germany.
GlobalFoundries has been making a move into the silicon photonics business over the past year. In late 2025, the company acquired Singapore-based Advanced Micro Foundry, a silicon photonics foundry. This positions GlobalFoundries among the world’s largest pure-play silicon photonics foundries.
