Sivers Invests $30M to Expand European Photonics Manufacturing

Sivers Semiconductors AB has announced a $30 million strategic investment to expand its Indium Phosphide (InP) manufacturing facility in Glasgow, Scotland. Beginning in the second half of 2026, with operational readiness slated for the fourth quarter of 2027, the project will scale annual production capacity to over 100 million continuous-wave distributed feedback (CW DFB) lasers. The upgraded facility will introduce advanced process capabilities, greater automation, and improved production flexibility to meet surging demand from hyperscale artificial intelligence and optical networking programs.

The investment marks Sivers' transition from a Fab-Lite strategy to a Hybrid Manufacturing model, combining expanded in-house wafer fabrication with established foundry, packaging, and assembly partners in Asia. As hyperscalers construct denser compute clusters and migrate toward ultra-high-speed networking architectures, demand for advanced optical interconnect technologies is accelerating. Sivers' InP-based CW DFB lasers and semiconductor optical amplifiers serve as critical light engines, enabling high-performance, energy-efficient optical connectivity capable of supporting high-volume AI deployments.

Additional Context
This section provides technological and market background not explicitly detailed in the original release.

The massive scale of modern AI cluster deployments has triggered a critical interconnect bottleneck inside data centers. Traditional copper interconnects face severe physical limitations regarding thermal dissipation, latency, and signal attenuation when operating at data rates of 800 Gbps, 1.6 Tbps, and beyond. To overcome this, the industry is transitioning toward Silicon Photonics (SiPh) and Co-Packaged Optics (CPO), where optical engines are placed adjacent to or on the same substrate as the compute switch ASIC or GPU. However, because silicon is an indirect bandgap semiconductor, it cannot emit light efficiently. It requires external, highly stable continuous-wave distributed feedback (CW DFB) lasers manufactured from Indium Phosphide (InP) III-V materials to inject continuous optical power into silicon photonic waveguides. Producing InP lasers requires complex metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) epitaxial growth and sub-micron grating lithography. Expanding dedicated InP wafer production in Europe bolsters supply-chain resilience for these non-silicon components, mitigating single-region reliance for the critical hardware powering hyperscale AI backbones.

Edited by Lekshman Ramdas, Induportals editor – adapted by AI.

www.sivers-semiconductors.com