The US Department of Commerce has signed letters of intent to inject up to $874 million of CHIPS and Science Act R&D funding into seven companies working across integrated photonics, novel memory, advanced packaging, substrates and secure supply chains for AI compute infrastructure - and Commerce will take minority, non-controlling equity stakes in each as a condition of the money.
Who got what
The largest slice - up to $300 million - goes to GlobalFoundries to accelerate co-packaged optics next to AI processors by two to three years. Kepler lands up to $245 million for 3D ferroelectric AI memory, and Multibeam Corporation up to $140 million for stacked multi-chip packaging.
The frontier bets
Extropic takes up to $75 million for its thermodynamic sampling units - probabilistic silicon that exploits thermal noise to solve optimisation and AI problems at a fraction of digital energy budgets. Thintronics receives up to $50 million for ultra-low-loss inter-layer dielectrics; OBSIDIA Semiconductors up to $34 million for non-invasive counterfeit-detection; and Aeluma up to $30 million for indium-phosphide-free substrates for photonic interconnects.
Why it matters
Commerce framed the seven awards as targeting the compute-supply-chain choke points that determine how quickly AI infrastructure can scale - bandwidth, memory hierarchy, packaging density and provenance. The equity condition mirrors the Trump administration's push, previously seen in the Pentagon's PDW loan, to convert CHIPS grants into taxpayer upside.
Reporting based on coverage from NIST, Department of Commerce and press releases.