300-million Dollars Awarded to GlobalFoundries

GlobalFoundries and the United States Department of Commerce have entered into a letter of intent to accelerate research and development of next-generation silicon photonics. The U.S. Department of Commerce is expected to award 300 million dollars to GlobalFoundries under the CHIPS and Science Act.

The award will accelerate GF’s development of next-generation silicon photonics wafer technologies, novel optical materials and advanced packaging. 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.

In a separate agreement, the U.S. Department of Commerce will receive equity from Global Foundries, representing approximately 1 percent ownership as of July 29th. 

Silicon photonics enables ultra-high bandwidth, energy-efficient data movement by transmitting information with light rather than electrical signals — delivering greater performance, higher interconnect density and lower power consumption as AI and data center workloads scale.

“Silicon photonics is essential to AI infrastructure. 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,” said Tim Breen, CEO of GlobalFoundries.