GlobalFoundries Completes Dresden Fab Expansion and Unveils FDX Fusion – Unite.AI

GlobalFoundries celebrated the completion of its €1.1 billion SPRINT expansion in Dresden, Germany, on October 9, 2026, and announced FDX Fusion, a next-generation physical AI chip platform that the company plans to develop and manufacture at the site.

SPRINT expansion construction milestone

As part of the SPRINT project, GlobalFoundries is investing 1.1 billion euros to expand production capacity at its Dresden site. The expansion is expected to increase annual production capacity to more than one million 300mm wafers by the end of 2028, making it Europe’s largest foundry site, according to the company. GF said the additional capacity will support its differentiated technologies for automotive, aerospace, industrial IoT and defense applications.

GF said this phase of construction was completed on time and on budget, allowing the remaining work at both the existing facility and expansion to continue as planned. Exyte is the general contractor on the project, and Mark Vokes, Exyte project director, said SPRINT is expanding the complex manufacturing and cleanroom infrastructure while the existing facility remains fully operational.

Tim Breen, CEO of GlobalFoundries, said Europe’s industrial base depends on chips that must be available, reliable and built close to the customers who rely on them. “SPRINT expands that capability in Dresden by offering customers a path to the next generation of energy-efficient computing for physical AI,” he said. Manfred Horstmann, managing director and senior vice president of GlobalFoundries, described the project as an investment in Germany’s future as an industrial and innovation hub and in Europe’s resilient supply chains.

The SPRINT expansion is supported by the European Union, the German federal government and the Free State of Saxony under the European Chips Act. GF said the expansion will also allow it to offer processes and data flows only in Europe for customers with stringent security requirements, including critical infrastructure and aerospace customers.

Dresden site and 2025 announcement

GlobalFoundries employs approximately 3,000 people in Dresden and operates approximately 60,000 square meters of cleanrooms and laboratories, with a current annual production capacity of up to 950,000 300 mm wafers depending on the product mix. Since 2009 the company has invested more than 10 billion euros in Dresden, describing it as one of the largest industrial investments in Germany.

GlobalFoundries first announced the €1.1 billion SPRINT investment plan on October 28, 2025, with an expected increase in production capacity to over one million wafers per year by the end of 2028. At the time, the company expected that the project would be supported by the German federal government and the state of Saxony under the European chip law. On the day of the announcement, Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited the Dresden headquarters and welcomed the planned investment, describing SPRINT as a commitment to Germany as an industrial and innovation hub. GF has also joined the Made for Germany initiative, a coalition of companies demonstrating a long-term commitment to Germany through major industrial investments.

FDX fusion platform and development history

During the ceremony, GF also announced plans to develop and produce FDX Fusion, the next generation of its fully depleted silicon-on-insulator technology, in Dresden. According to the company, the platform targets 7nm-class digital performance combined with analog, mixed-signal, embedded memory and high-performance RF capabilities, with the goal of providing energy-efficient processing, sensing, real-time control and secure connectivity within a single technology.

In a separate roadmap released the same day, GF described FDX Fusion as purpose-built for Sense, Think, Act, Communicate (STAC) workloads and characterized it as the first process technology in Europe to deliver single-digit nanometer digital performance optimized for the physical world. The company expects the first generation of FDX Fusion to offer more than 2x density improvement over first-generation FDX technology, along with RF performance up to 0.5 THz ft/fmax, low-loss operation, in-memory compute capability, built-in non-volatile memory and dense logic.

Ed Kaste, senior vice president of GF’s CMOS business, said the platform “extends GF’s FD-SOI roadmap with innovations across the substrate, transistor and interconnect stack.” He described FDX Fusion as purpose-built for energy-efficient physical AI applications.

GF said customers can utilize its design enablement ecosystem, including its IP portfolio of MIPS and ARC processors, RISC-V instruction set architecture and application-specific processor design capabilities. The company said it is engaged with several customers in the initial development and evaluation of the platform, using real-world application requirements to inform product design. GF anticipates that FDX Fusion will address applications including edge inference, robotics, industrial automation, autonomous systems, sensor fusion architectures and intelligent connected devices in the automotive, consumer and industrial markets.

Statements from partners accompanied the release of the roadmap. Patrick Press, executive vice president of external wafer manufacturing at Infineon, said Infineon and GF are strengthening their collaboration to define and explore future 7nm-class FDX Fusion technologies for next-generation radar and wireless communications products. CEA-Leti CEO Sébastien Dauvé said the institute’s FAMES pilot continues to outline the future European roadmap for FD-SOI. Executives from Bosch, NXP, Siemens and Tesla, along with a statement from BMW, highlighted requirements spanning robotics, reliable edge computing and supply chain resilience for physical AI.

GF plans to begin production of the FDX Fusion in 2028 at its Dresden plant. The demonstration silicon will be initially evaluated by customers in early 2027, with an initial process design kit planned for mid-2027, and the company said the platform will include optimized process flows and cost structures for rapid prototyping. GF Dresden intends to pursue development of the technology through the upcoming IPCEI Advanced Semiconductor Technologies program, subject to approval from the German federal government, and noted that the actual start of development work is dependent on such approval.