Coherent Corp Sherman Texas facility receives 50 million dollars in federal CHIPS Act funding to expand Indium Phosphide semiconductor production for AI optical networking infrastructure
Coherent Corp announced signing a non binding letter of intent with the US Department of Commerce to receive as much as $50,000,000 of direct federal funding under the CHIPS and Science Act. The funding is intended for expanding the already existing 6 inch Indium Phosphide semiconductor fabrication facility, which is located in Sherman Texas. The capital is intended to meet increasing global demand for optical networking devices which support modern artificial intelligence datacenter infrastructure.
This proposed expansion is expected to double the size of the existing active manufacturing footprint of the Sherman site and quadruple its total wafer production capacity. Upon completion, the facility is predicted to create more than 1,000 new jobs within the region, including more than 550 direct technical, engineering, and advanced manufacturing jobs. This federal investment will follow a $20,000,000 in investment by the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund and the Sherman Economic Development Corporation.
The Sherman facility focuses on producing Indium Phosphide photonic devices, a specialty semiconductor capable of managing high performance optical networking. Larger and larger AI workloads demand that photonic devices are the key to unlocking bottlenecks of data movement within massive clusters of computers. Jim Anderson, Chief Executive Officer of Coherent, spoke about the importance of this technology in the domestic supply chain
"AI is revolutionizing the world and ushering in a new era of American manufacturing to support the AI datacenters of the future. The building blocks of AI infrastructure are semiconductor photonic devices to carry unprecedented data speeds between processors, memories and systems," Anderson said in a statement.
For more than 20 years, Coherent has partnered closely with NVIDIA on designs for hardware configurations for massive computational architectures. This expansion in Texas will contribute to the secure domestic supply of components needed to build massive computing clusters, and Department of Commerce Executive Director for Semiconductor Investment and Innovation Bill Frauenhofer spoke to the importance of this federal investment
"Indium phosphide photonics are critical for high speed data transmission in AI, communications and other advanced networks, and CHIPS incentives will help strengthen U.S. Manufacturing and speed up critical next generation optical technologies."
This project is expected to see strong cooperation between hardware designers, state and federal government, and hardware manufacturers. NVIDIA Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang discussed how the massive computational factories of the modern era will demand a new approach to designing and manufacturing hardware
"AI factories are the new industrial revolution infrastructure, connecting trillions of GPUs into one thinking machine relies on optical technologies at scale, at speed and at energy efficiency. NVIDIA has partnered closely with Coherent for more than two decades, and their InP manufacturing increase in Texas will further bolster a strong supply chain that the world relies on for AI infrastructure."
The Sherman manufacturing site is already the world's first and largest 6 inch Indium Phosphide wafer facility in terms of volume. New cleanroom and advanced wafer manufacturing equipment will be added to expand operations.
