Coherent Breaks Ground on Expanded Texas Facility, Scaling AI’s Optical Backbone
NVIDIA Blog · NVIDIA Newsroom · 2026-06-16
Coherent and NVIDIA broke ground on an expanded indium phosphide manufacturing facility in Sherman, Texas, backed by a $50M CHIPS Act grant and a $2B NVIDIA investment to scale optical interconnects for AI data center infrastructure.
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Extraction
Topics: optical-interconnectssemiconductor-manufacturingai-infrastructurechips-actindium-phosphide
Claims
- Coherent received a $50 million CHIPS Act grant to expand its Sherman, Texas facility, building on $17 million in earlier state and local support.
- NVIDIA has invested $2 billion in Coherent with a multibillion-dollar purchase commitment for advanced laser and optical networking products.
- Copper interconnects cannot span the distances required in modern AI GPU clusters, making indium phosphide optical components essential for systems like NVIDIA's NVL576.
- Coherent's move from 3-inch to 6-inch InP wafers roughly quadruples usable wafer area, lowering unit costs and enabling the volume the AI buildout demands.
- The expanded Sherman facility will support more than 550 direct jobs at full capacity, in a city of roughly 45,000 people.
Key quotes
AI is the ultimate general-purpose technology. Because intelligence is fundamental — the ability to process information, to reason and solve problems — it affects every single industry.
AI runs on compute, but it scales on connectivity — and Sherman is where that connective tissue gets built.
We were founded as a manufacturing company in 1971. We've always been a U.S. manufacturing company — and after 50 years, the most advanced 6-inch indium phosphide line in the world is right here in Sherman.