GlobalFoundries and Marvell Technology have expanded a multi-year agreement to increase production capacity for semiconductors used in high-speed optical connections inside data centres. The technology in focus is silicon-germanium (SiGe), made at GlobalFoundries’ plant in Burlington, Vermont.

Demand is coming from the expansion of AI data centres, where accelerators must move very large volumes of information. The companies say SiGe enables faster and more energy-efficient devices, useful for pluggable optical transceivers, near-packaged optics and co-packaged optics.

Robb Johnson, Marvell’s vice-president for foundry technology, said the expanded collaboration should secure SiGe technology and manufacturing capacity for the growth he sees ahead. Marvell supplies connectivity for cloud infrastructure and for networks used to train and run models.

The move underlines that part of the AI contest has shifted from the performance of a single processor towards the speed at which thousands of chips talk to one another. Optical links can ease bottlenecks and the energy cost of data transfer, but they still depend on customer orders.

The announcement is not a guarantee of revenue or of how much of the new capacity will be used. The expansion timetable, actual orders and investment in data centres will decide utilisation. Thursday’s share-price moves are not a financial forecast.

The partnership remains an industrial commitment, not a public contract with fixed volumes. Without delivery figures and a firm commissioning date, the effect on the AI connectivity market will show in execution, not in the press release.

Image: GlobalFoundries Dresden / Fensterblick / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. A German fab, not the Vermont expansion. Cropped to 16:9.

Source consulted: GlobalFoundries, Marvell expand chip capacity deal for AI data center connectivity | Reuters; Newsroom | GlobalFoundries.