Coherent Breaks Ground on Expanded Texas Facility, Scaling AI’s Optical Backbone
TL;DR
Coherent broke ground on June 16, 2026, on an expanded manufacturing building in Sherman, Texas. The site makes lasers, optical components and compound semiconductors for AI data centers. The key asset is a 6-inch indium phosphide fab. Coherent calls it the first volume production line of its kind, meant to produce more lasers and optical modules per wafer. The expansion is backed by a 50 million dollar CHIPS Act grant, on top of roughly 17 million dollars from Texas and Sherman economic programs.
Nauti's Take
If you're building AI stacks, stop staring only at GPUs. Coherent points to the next bottleneck: light paths, lasers, wafer size.
If 6-inch InP brings costs down, clusters will not just connect faster, they will be planned differently.
Briefingshow
AI clusters do not scale through GPUs alone, but through the links between them. When systems such as NVIDIA Vera Rubin Ultra NVL576 connect hundreds of GPUs across multiple racks, copper becomes inefficient and optics moves to the center. The Texas expansion is therefore a supply-chain story: less dependence on thin overseas capacity for a component that can bottleneck AI infrastructure.
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