Минторг США выделил GlobalFoundries $300 млн на фотонику для ИИ-инфраструктуры

The U.S. Department of Commerce awarded GlobalFoundries a $300 million grant on August 3, 2026. The funding is directed at developing next-generation photonics, optical materials, and advanced semiconductor packaging — key components for next-generation AI infrastructure.

Why Do Data Centers Need Photonics?

Photonics is the technology of transmitting data via light signals instead of electrical ones. In traditional server racks, data travels along copper traces and cables, which limits bandwidth and causes intense heat generation. When scaling AI clusters to tens of thousands of GPUs, copper interconnects become a physical bottleneck: transmission speed and energy efficiency cannot keep pace with the growth of computational workloads.

Optical solutions remove this constraint. Light signals propagate faster, generate almost no heat in the conductor, and allow multiplexing — the simultaneous transmission of multiple data streams over a single fiber. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, data center energy consumption in the country is rising sharply under AI workload pressure; the shift to photonics is seen as one of the key ways to contain this growth.

Key grant parameters:

• Amount: $300 million from the U.S. Department of Commerce
• Recipient: GlobalFoundries
• Focus areas: next-generation photonics, optical materials, advanced semiconductor packaging
• Program: CHIPS and Science Act (passed in 2022, total budget $52 billion)

Why GlobalFoundries?

GlobalFoundries is one of the world's largest independent contract semiconductor manufacturers. Unlike TSMC or Samsung, the company does not focus on cutting-edge sub-nanometer process nodes, but instead specializes in mature and niche nodes: telecommunications, automotive electronics, aerospace, and defense. GlobalFoundries already has its own silicon photonics platform, enabling the integration of optical components directly onto the semiconductor die without additional signal conversion.

"This investment will support the next generation of photonics, optical materials, and advanced semiconductor packaging for AI infrastructure," the U.S.

Department of Commerce stated in an official release.

GlobalFoundries' manufacturing facilities are located in the United States (New York State), Germany (Dresden), and Singapore. The American location of its plants makes the company a priority candidate under the CHIPS Act. According to the Department of Commerce, among the largest announced recipients of the CHIPS program are Intel (approximately $8.5 billion) and TSMC (approximately $6.6 billion); the GlobalFoundries grant continues this trajectory, focusing on specialized areas — photonics and packaging.

What This Means

The $300 million grant is a signal of a shift in priorities within AI infrastructure. The United States is now investing not only in faster chips, but also in how those chips are connected to one another. Photonics and advanced packaging represent the next layer of the technology stack, without which the scaling of AI clusters runs into the physical limitations of copper. If the first wave of the CHIPS Act was aimed at high-volume logic chips, the GlobalFoundries grant marks a second front: specialized optical components and interconnects as the strategic infrastructure of the AI era.