AMD is reportedly planning to establish a silicon photonics R&D center in Southern Taiwan with an investment of NT$8.64 billion. This move is seen as a strategic effort to bolster its capabilities in high-speed data transmission, a critical area for advancing AI and high-performance computing, positioning it more competitively against rivals Intel and NVIDIA who are also heavily invested in this technology. The project also involves a collaboration with Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs to develop advanced two-phase immersion cooling technologies. This cooling breakthrough is aimed at boosting chip stability and energy efficiency, which is crucial for handling the heavy workloads of large language model training and inference. This development follows AMD's acquisition of silicon photonics startup Enosemi in May.