GFS
Washington's favorite side quest: chips
The Commerce Department signed letters of intent to hand out $874 million in CHIPS and Science Act incentives to seven companies working on AI and high-performance computing. The star of the show? GlobalFoundries, which could get up to $300 million to push U.S. R&D on co-packaged optics — basically photonics meeting AI processors so the chips can move data faster without guzzling quite as much power.
Why investors should care
This isn't a one-off government photo op. It's part of a bigger Trump-era push to use federal money like venture capital for strategic tech. In exchange, the government is also taking minority, non-controlling equity stakes in some recipients, which is a very 2026 sentence if there ever was one.
For GlobalFoundries, the award reinforces its role in the domestic semiconductor supply chain, especially around advanced packaging and next-gen computing infrastructure. That matters if you're betting on the AI buildout story, because the winners aren't always the loudest chip designers — sometimes it's the foundries and infrastructure players keeping the whole thing from falling over.
The wider chip candy bag
The announcement also included funding for companies working on:
- advanced AI memory
- chip packaging
- low-power computing
- semiconductor materials
- counterfeit-detection systems
And yes, the administration is building on a prior nearly $2 billion CHIPS push from May that included IBM, D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti, and Infleqtion. Different round, same theme: Washington wants more of the semiconductor action to happen on U.S. soil.
Big picture: When the government starts handing out equity-backed incentives to chip companies, you know the AI arms race has moved from software hype to industrial policy. That's great news if you're invested in the picks-and-shovels layer of the boom.