Coherent has broken ground on an expanded manufacturing facility in Sherman, Texas, with Nvidia on hand for the ceremony — a sign of how tightly the two companies' futures are intertwined in the race to build faster AI infrastructure.
According to reporting by KXII and MSN, the expansion will quadruple Coherent's wafer production capacity at the Sherman site. The company also announced $50 million in federal funding to support the project.
Coherent makes the lasers, optical components, and compound semiconductors that connect AI systems to one another — the physical plumbing that carries data between chips and servers at enormous scale. As the Nvidia Blog put it, the company is scaling "AI's optical backbone."
Nvidia has been vocal about the importance of optical networking to AI infrastructure. As Digitimes noted, Nvidia highlighted the role of optical networking alongside the groundbreaking, underscoring that raw chip performance increasingly depends on how fast data can travel between those chips.
The Sherman expansion represents a bet that demand for AI optical components will keep surging — and that building that capacity in Texas, backed by federal dollars, is the right place to do it. As AI clusters grow larger and more power-hungry, the connective tissue linking them together matters just as much as the processors themselves.