[News] AMD Reportedly to Set up Silicon Photonics R&D center in Southern Taiwan with NT$8.64B Investment

While NVIDIA unveiled its latest silicon photonics breakthrough last week—teaming up with Meta and Oracle to enhance AI data center networks using Spectrum-X Ethernet switches—another AI chip titan is stepping up its game.

According to the Liberty Times, AMD has picked Tainan and Kaohsiung for new R&D hubs, building teams dedicated to silicon photonics, AI, and heterogeneous integration.

The report adds that AMD’s Taiwan investment, under Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs’ (MOEA) A+ Global R&D Innovation Partnership Program, will exceed NT$8.64 billion (USD $270 million), including NT$3.31 billion in government subsidies and NT$5.33 billion from AMD. AMD’s project will reportedly involve collaboration with National Sun Yat-sen University and other local research partners to strengthen Taiwan’s silicon photonics ecosystem and foster industry clustering.

According to Liberty Times, AMD is not only establishing a silicon photonics R&D hub in southern Taiwan but also teaming up with MOEA to develop two-phase immersion cooling. The breakthrough pushes cooling capacity beyond 1,500W, boosting chip stability and energy efficiency, and has been validated at AMD’s facilities to ensure reliable performance under heavy loads and faster LLM training and inference, the report notes.

Major Players’ Moves

As reported by Commercial Times, chip giants are moving aggressively into silicon photonics. Intel has already shipped over 8 million EICs, while NVIDIA is integrating the technology into its switches and GPUs, the report adds. NVIDIA’s first Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) switch, Spectrum-X—now adopted by major players like Oracle and Meta—offers 3.5× better power efficiency, 10× higher network resiliency, and 1.3× faster deployment than traditional networks, according to the company.

Commercial Times notes that as a latecomer, AMD leverages its ecosystem—from x86 CPUs and RDNA GPUs to FPGAs and server manufacturing via ZT Systems—to build a full end-to-end platform. Its push got a boost in May with the acquisition of U.S. startup Enosemi, a developer of integrated photonics and CPO for AI interconnects. According to optics.org, AMD and Enosemi had already collaborated on photonics tech, with Enosemi’s advanced chipsets manufactured by GlobalFoundries, the foundry AMD spun off in 2009.

Notably, Commercial Times suggested that TSMC is set to be a major winner with its silicon-photonics CPO solutions. Supply chain sources cited by the report say that stacking EIC/PIC (electrical and photonic chips) via TSMC’s SoIC offers a clear view of its CPO development progress. TSMC’s SoIC monthly capacity is expected to reach 30,000–40,000 wafers by the end of 2026, the report adds.

As TechNews explains, silicon photonics (SiPh) integrates optical components onto a single chip, using light refraction and waveguides to transmit and process optical signals, accelerating data transfer.

Notably, silicon photonics has long been hailed as a key solution for boosting data center bandwidth and enhancing connectivity between servers and switches. The evolution, as the report highlights, progressed from traditional pluggable optical modules (long electrical paths) to LPO (Linear Pluggable Optics) as a transitional solution, culminating in CPO (Co-Packaged Optics), which co-packages optical components directly with compute chips on the same substrate for the shortest possible transmission distance.

Read more

• [News] Silicon Photonics in the Spotlight: TSMC Lifts the Curtain on COUPE at SEMICON Taiwan
• [News] TSMC Advances in Silicon Photonics: Broadcom and NVIDIA Set to Be First Customers
• [News] NVIDIA Teams up with TSMC for Silicon Photonics Switches, Expected in 2025-26

(Photo credit: AMD)