GlobalFoundries Wins $300M CHIPS Award to Scale Silicon Photonics for US AI Infrastructure

The U.S. Department of Commerce signed a letter of intent Wednesday with GlobalFoundries for a $300 million award from its CHIPS Research and Development Office — federal backing designed to pull silicon photonics, the technology that moves data using light instead of electrical signals, out of the research pipeline and into high-volume American manufacturing. The announcement sent GFS shares rising roughly 9.5% in pre-market trading and drew endorsements from every major AI hardware maker, a breadth of industry support that signals just how acutely the semiconductor ecosystem feels the pressure of a data-movement bottleneck that copper alone can no longer solve. The award, which remains subject to negotiation before it becomes a binding commitment, will fund development of next-generation silicon photonics wafer technologies, novel optical materials, and advanced packaging — including a technique called 3D hybrid bonding — that GlobalFoundries says are prerequisites for bringing near-packaged and co-packaged optical architectures to production scale in the United States. Every AI training cluster is, at its core, a data-movement problem. Processors sit idle if they cannot exchange parameters, gradients, and activations fast enough to stay synchronized — and the copper interconnects that have handled this traffic for decades are running out of…