GlobalFoundries Secures $300 Million CHIPS Award for Silicon Photonics Research
THE SO WHAT
A $300M CHIPS award for GlobalFoundries’ silicon photonics is a bet that optical interconnects are the only way to keep AI and data center bandwidth scaling. If you run high-throughput systems, expect your future bottlenecks — and vendor questions — to move from compute to photonic IO.
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Deep & Emerging TechGlobalFoundries says the US plans to award it $300M in CHIPS Act funding to bolster R&D of silicon photonics tech to power more efficient AI data centers
$300M of CHIPS Act money into GlobalFoundries silicon photonics—per [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-award-globalfoundries-300-million-develop-faster-ai-chip-links-2026-07-29/)—is a bet that interconnect, not just GPUs, is the next AI data center choke point. If you’re planning multi-year AI infra, start asking vendors about photonics roadmaps and how they’ll change bandwidth, power, and topology assumptions.
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