GlobalFoundries Signs $300M CHIPS Deal for Silicon Photonics

The Commerce Department signed a letter of intent with GlobalFoundries for a $300 million CHIPS R&D award covering silicon photonics — moving data between chips with light instead of copper. The stated targets are 400 Gb/s links and roughly fivefold better energy efficiency than electrical interconnect, supporting near-packaged and co-packaged optics for AI systems. Work runs through the company’s Malta, New York and Burlington, Vermont sites. It is a bet on the next bottleneck: once memory and compute are both scarce, the wire between them is what limits how large a coherent training domain can get.