Tower Semiconductor (NASDAQ:TSEM) shares jumped 16% on Thursday morning after the company announced a strategic collaboration with NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) to develop advanced silicon photonics solutions aimed at supporting artificial intelligence data centre infrastructure.
The Israel-based semiconductor foundry said it will support the expansion of AI infrastructure by providing high-performance silicon photonics technology for 1.6T optical data centre modules designed to operate with NVIDIA’s networking protocols. The company stated that its silicon photonics technology can deliver data transfer rates up to twice as fast as earlier solutions, increasing bandwidth capacity and improving performance for AI workloads.
“Tower Semiconductor is proud to deliver advanced, high-speed technologies that support demanding data center and AI requirements,” said Russell Ellwanger, CEO of Tower Semiconductor. The company added that it continues investing in its silicon-germanium (SiGe) and silicon photonics platforms to support next-generation data centre architectures.
The partnership is designed to address the rapid growth in demand for AI infrastructure and networking performance.
“The exponential growth of AI is driving the need for a new class of high-speed, scalable networking to connect AI infrastructure,” said Gilad Shainer, Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA.
Tower noted that its silicon photonics platform is specifically designed for high-speed optical interconnect applications, positioning the company as a manufacturing partner for firms developing AI infrastructure, advanced data centre networking technologies and next-generation telecommunications systems.