Coherent broke ground on an expanded manufacturing building in Sherman, Texas, and Jensen Huang was there for the ceremony. The project is meant to scale production of InP wafers that carry data between chips, servers and data centers, giving the company more U.S. capacity for the optical and compound semiconductor hardware that helps wire AI systems together.
The timing matters because Huang is not showing up for just any factory event. NVIDIA has said it plans to produce up to $500 billion of AI infrastructure in the United States through industry partnerships with new sites in Arizona and Texas, and Coherent is part of that network. The two companies have worked together for roughly two decades, and in March NVIDIA said it would invest $2 billion in Coherent to support research and development, future capacity and U.S.-based manufacturing.
Jim Anderson attended the groundbreaking with Huang, and Shawn Temann and Adriana Cruz also took part in the event. Coherent said the expanded Sherman building is backed by a $50 million CHIPS Act grant, building on roughly $17 million in earlier support from the Texas CHIPS program and the Sherman Economic Development Corporation. The company runs what it calls the world’s first 6-inch indium phosphide fab, and the new building is intended to push more of that work into higher volume.
That matters because the supply chains for indium phosphide and gallium arsenide have been thin for years even as demand for AI optical infrastructure has climbed. Those materials sit at the center of the links that move information fast enough for modern AI, alongside silicon photonics and NVLink-style interconnects, and that has made U.S.-based capacity a strategic issue rather than just a manufacturing one. Coherent’s expansion is part of the larger effort to rebuild advanced semiconductor production inside the country, not just assemble more chips around it.
Huang put the stakes in blunt terms at the ceremony, calling AI the ultimate general-purpose technology and saying intelligence affects every industry because it is fundamental to processing information, reasoning and solving problems. He also said Coherent is vital to the future of AI and to reindustrializing the United States. What remains unanswered is the one thing buyers, suppliers and investors will be watching most closely: when the expanded Sherman facility will begin producing at scale.
