What happened
The US government plans to award $300 million to chipmaker GlobalFoundries. The funding comes from the CHIPS and Science Act. GlobalFoundries will use the money to develop optical links for AI chips. These connections use light instead of electricity to transfer data quickly.
The context
Modern AI clusters suffer from bottlenecks when thousands of chips exchange data. Copper connections consume high amounts of energy and limit bandwidth. Silicon photonics can move data faster while cutting power use in large datacentres.
Sources
- Reuters ↗ via Google News Reported