Former Intel CEO gets $150M from Trump administration for chip-laser startup
The Commerce Department’s first CHIPS R&D investment under Trump backs Pat Gelsinger’s xLight in its bid to reinvent the laser at the heart of advanced chipmaking.
The Trump administration has agreed to take a stake in xLight, a startup seeking to develop free-electron lasers viewed as key to producing faster computing chips.
The U.S. Department of Commerce said on Monday that the government will inject up to $150 million into the company but did not disclose the size of the stake. Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger serves as the executive chairman at xLight.
The Department’s CHIPS Research and Development Office said it has signed a non-binding preliminary letter of intent to provide U.S. government incentives. This marks the office’s first investment since the Trump administration took over the $7.4 billion Biden-era semiconductor research institute.
In the world of advanced chip manufacturing, the most critical tool is an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine that prints chip patterns onto silicon wafers. The Netherlands’ ASML is currently the only company in the world that makes such a machine, though startups such as Substrate are attempting to develop competitors.
Within the lithography machine, the most difficult component to build is the laser. xLight has proposed using technology derived from particle accelerators to create a laser that uses far less electricity than current systems, and it is working with U.S. national labs to develop a prototype that could be integrated into machines made by ASML or others.
“For far too long, America ceded the frontier of advanced lithography to others. Under President Trump, those days are over,” Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said in a statement.
