GlobalFoundries and Marvell Technology have signed a multi-year agreement to expand production of silicon germanium (SiGe) semiconductors at GF's Burlington, Vermont facility. The deal directly targets the physical infrastructure powering AI data centers, where demand for high-speed optical interconnects is reshaping how facilities are designed and built.
The expanded collaboration increases manufacturing capacity for SiGe technology used in next-generation pluggable optical transceivers, Near-Packaged Optics (NPO), and Co-packaged Optics (CPO). These components form the backbone of data movement inside the massive distributed compute systems that define modern AI workloads.
The physical layer of AI infrastructure
AI data centers operate as distributed systems. Performance depends on accelerators, but also on the connections between them. As these facilities scale, moving data efficiently becomes a primary engineering constraint. The optical networking technologies covered by this agreement sit at the intersection of semiconductor fabrication and physical site infrastructure.
GF's SiGe portfolio supports 200G-per-lane optical connectivity, with a roadmap targeting higher speeds as bandwidth requirements grow. The company has manufactured advanced SiGe technology for over a decade and continues integrating it with silicon photonics and advanced packaging for NPO and CPO architectures.
What the companies said
Robb Johnson, Vice President of Foundry Technology at Marvell, framed the deal around structural changes in data center design. "AI is fundamentally changing the way data centers are built, and connectivity is becoming increasingly critical to unlocking the performance of these systems," Johnson said. "As the industry moves toward higher-bandwidth optical architectures, including NPO and CPO, Marvell is investing aggressively to lead this transition."
Shankaran Janardhanan, senior vice president of Photonics & RF businesses at GF, pointed to the manufacturing foundation behind the agreement. "SiGe is where GF's decades of high-performance radio frequency and analog leadership translate directly into breakthrough optical performance," Janardhanan said. "We will continue investing in our technology roadmap and manufacturing capabilities both in the U.S. and around the world to support our customers' future growth."
Why this matters for real estate and construction
The agreement signals sustained demand for specialized data center facilities. Optical interconnect technologies like NPO and CPO influence physical layout decisions - rack spacing, cooling requirements, and cabling pathways all shift when data moves at higher speeds across shorter distances. Construction firms and developers planning AI-ready data center projects should track these component-level roadmaps. A semiconductor capacity expansion in Vermont may seem distant from a jobsite, but it directly shapes the specifications that will appear in future facility RFPs.
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