globalfoundries
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The Chip Giant That Quit the Nanometer Race - and Found Its Edge
GlobalFoundries walked away from the industry’s most expensive contest. Now its specialty chips sit inside phones, cars, factories and the optical plumbing of AI - a bet that useful can matter more than smallest.
MIPS
MIPS is a San Jose-based semiconductor IP company with a 40-year heritage in RISC computing. After abandoning its own legacy architecture, MIPS reinvented itself around the open RISC-V instruction set and now builds compute subsystems for autonomous platforms across automotive, industrial, robotics, and edge AI markets. Its Atlas portfolio - spanning Sense, Think, Act, and Communicate building blocks - targets the low-latency, safety-critical demands of what the company calls Physical AI. In July 2025, GlobalFoundries announced a deal to acquire MIPS.
Lightmatter
Lightmatter is building a photonic supercomputer. The Mountain View company uses light, not electrons, to move data between AI chips - tackling the bandwidth and energy wall that's about to crash into the next generation of data centers. Its Passage interconnect and Envise processor aim to connect millions of chips at the speed of light.