Optical-components maker Coherent (stock ticker COHR) has secured up to $50 million to expand AI chip manufacturing in Texas, according to Yahoo Finance.
The plant is tied closely to Nvidia. Dallas News reports that Nvidia is investing in the North Texas semiconductor manufacturing facility, deepening the chip giant's push to build out its supply chain on US soil.
What makes the factory notable is the technology it centers on. According to Wccftech, Coherent's new Texas plant "replaces copper with light" — a shift to silicon photonics, which moves data using optical signals rather than traditional copper wiring. Wccftech says the output is meant to power Nvidia's 576-GPU Vera Rubin data centers, framing the project as part of what it calls "the silicon photonics era."
The logic behind the switch is straightforward: as AI data centers pack ever more GPUs together, the copper connections that shuttle data between chips become a bottleneck and a source of heat and power loss. Light-based interconnects promise faster, more energy-efficient links between the thousands of processors that train and run large AI models.
The combination of funding, a US location, and Nvidia's direct involvement signals how much of the AI buildout now depends not just on the chips themselves but on the plumbing that connects them.
Why it matters: the race to scale AI is increasingly being won or lost on how quickly data can move between chips, and this Texas plant is a bet that the future of those connections is light, not copper.