GlobalFoundries and Marvell are scaling up silicon photonics efforts as data centers outgrow copper wiring

Data centers are rapidly expanding their reliance on AI accelerators and generating enormous volumes of data, which has led major manufacturers to seek advanced connectivity solutions. GlobalFoundries and Marvell Technology have entered into a multi-year partnership to develop novel networking technologies. The agreement focuses on GlobalFoundries' silicon germanium (SiGe) technology, with the company boosting its production capacity at its Burlington, Vermont facility.

SiGe-based components are utilized in high-performance products, including pluggable optical transceivers, Near-Packaged Optics (NPO), and Co-packaged Optics (CPO). These silicon photonics solutions are becoming increasingly vital for AI data centers and other dense data processing systems.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Marvell, believes that the company could become the next trillion-dollar firm, and this collaboration may explain the surge in the AI industry's scale, requiring faster accelerators to exchange data via high-speed interconnects. GlobalFoundries has been producing SiGe technology for more than a decade and continues to invest in integrating SiGe, silicon photonics, and advanced packaging for new optical connectivity architectures like NPO and CPO.

As GlobalFoundries expands its SiGe production, Marvell plans to capitalize on the growing AI market and its own business prospects. The fabless chip manufacturer has experienced a substantial increase in valuation due to the AI boom, and it is poised to play a pivotal role in AI data centers and AI growth on a massive scale.

Nvidia has invested heavily in Marvell as part of a larger partnership encompassing silicon photonics and next-generation data center collaboration. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang anticipates Marvell to become the next trillion-dollar company on Wall Street. According to Robb Johnson, Marvell's VP of foundry technology, the industry is shifting towards higher-bandwidth optical architectures for data center connectivity fabrics.

In response, Marvell is significantly increasing its investment to lead this transformation. The two companies have collaborated on optical networking technology for over a decade. Traditionally, optics have been employed to interconnect racks and critical computing resources within data centers. However, copper-based interconnects remain responsible for moving data over shorter distances, as the technology has reached its practical limit of 400 Gbps per lane.