Future AI chips could be built on glass

Human-made glass is thousands of years old. But it’s now poised to find its way into the AI chips used in the world’s newest and largest data centers. This year, a South Korean company called Absolics is planning to start commercial production of special glass panels designed to make next-generation computing hardware more powerful and energy efficient. Other companies, including Intel, are also pushing forward in this area. If all goes well, such glass technology could reduce the energy demands of the sorts of high-performance computing chips used in AI data centers—and it could eventually do the same for consumer laptops and mobile devices if production costs fall.

The idea is to use glass as the substrate, or layer, on which multiple silicon chips are connected. This form of “packaging” is an increasingly popular way to build computing hardware, because it lets engineers combine specialized chips designed for specific functions into a single system. But it presents challenges, including the fact that hardworking chips can run so hot they physically warp the substrate they’re built on. This can lead to misaligned components and may reduce how efficiently the chips can be cooled, leading to damage or premature failure. 

“As AI workloads surge and package sizes expand, the industry is confronting very real mechanical constraints that impact the trajectory of high-performance computing,” says Deepak Kulkarni, a senior fellow at the chip design company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). “One of the most fundamental is warpage.”

That’s where glass comes in. It can handle the added heat better than existing substrates, and it will let engineers keep shrinking chip packages—which will make them faster and more energy efficient. It “unlocks the ability to keep scaling package footprints without hitting a mechanical wall,” says Kulkarni. 

Momentum is building behind the shift. Absolics has finished building a factory in the US that is dedicated to producing glass substrates for advanced chips and expects to begin commercial manufacturing this year. The US semiconductor manufacturer Intel is working toward incorporating glass in its next-generation chip packages, and its research has spurred other companies in the chip packaging supply chain to invest in it as well. South Korean and Chinese companies are among the early adopters. “Historically, this is not the first attempt to adopt glass in semiconductor packaging,” says Bilal Hachemi, senior technology and market analyst at the market research firm Yole Group. “But this time, the ecosystem is more solid and wider; the need for glass-based [technology] is sharper.” 

Fragile but mighty

Chip packaging has relied on organic substrates such as fiberglass-reinforced epoxy since the 1990s, says Rahul Manepalli, vice president of advanced packaging at Intel. But electrochemical complications limit how closely designers can place drilled holes to create copper-coated signal and power connections between the chips and the rest of the system. Chip designers must also account for the unpredictable shrinkage and distortion that organic substrates undergo as chips heat up and cool down. “We realized about a decade ago that we are going to have some limitations with organic substrates,” says Manepalli.

Glass may help overcome a lot of these limitations. Its thermal stability could allow engineers to create 10 times more connections per millimeter than organic substrates, says Manepalli. With denser connections, Intel’s designers can then stuff 50% more silicon chips into the same package area, improving computational capability. The denser connections also enable more efficient routing for the copper wires that deliver power to the chip. And the fact that glass dissipates heat more efficiently allows for chip designs that reduce overall power consumption. 

“The benefits of glass core substrates are undeniable,” says Manepalli. “It’s clear that the benefits will drive the industry to make this happen sooner rather than later, and we want to be one of the first ones who do it.” 

However, working with glass creates its own challenges. For one thing, it’s fragile. Glass substrates for data center chip packages are made from panels that are only about 700 micrometers to 1.4 millimeters thick, which leaves them susceptible to cracking or even shattering, says Manepalli. Researchers at Intel and other organizations have spent years figuring out how to use other materials and special tools to integrate the glass panels safely into semiconductor manufacturing processes. 

Now, Manepalli says, Intel’s research and development teams are reliably fabricating glass panels and churning out test chip packages that incorporate glass—and in early 2025 they demonstrated that a functional device with a glass core substrate could boot up the Windows operating system. It’s a significant improvement from the early testing days, when hundreds of glass panels got cracked every couple of days, he says.

Semiconductor manufacturers already use glass for more limited purposes, such as temporary support structures for silicon wafers. But the independent market research firm IDTechEx estimates there’s a big market for glass substrates, one that could boost the semiconductor market for glass from $1 billion in 2025 to as much as $4.4 billion by 2036. 

The material could have additional benefits if it takes off. Glass can be made astoundingly smooth—5,000 times smoother than organic substrates. This would eliminate defects that can arise as metal gets layered onto semiconductors, says Xiaoxi He, a research analyst at IDTechEx. Defects in these layers can worsen chips’ performance or even render them unusable.  

Glass could also help speed the movement of data. The material can guide light, which means chip designers could use it to build high-speed signal pathways directly into the substrate. Glass “holds enormous potential for the future of energy-efficient AI compute,” says Kulkarni at AMD, because a light-based system could move signals around with far less energy than the “power-hungry” copper pathways that are currently used to carry signals between chips in a package.

A panel pivot

Early research on glass packaging started at the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2009. The university eventually partnered with Absolics, a subsidiary of SKC, a South Korean company that produces chemicals and advanced materials. SKC constructed a semiconductor facility for manufacturing glass substrates in Covington, Georgia, in 2024, and the glass substrate partnership between Absolics and Georgia Tech was eventually awarded two grants in the same year—worth a combined $175 million—throughthe US government’s CHIPS for America program, established under the administration of President Joe Biden.

Now Absolics is moving toward commercialization; it plans to start manufacturing small quantities of glass substrates for customers this year. The company has led the way in commercializing glass substrates, says Yongwon Lee, a research engineer at Georgia Tech who is not directly involved in the commercial partnership with Absolics.

Absolics says its facility can currently produce a maximum of 12,000 square meters of glass panels a year. That’s enough, Lee estimates, to provide glass substrates for between 2 million and 3 million chip packages the size of Nvidia’s H100 GPU.

But the company isn’t alone. Lee says that multiple large manufacturers, including Samsung Electronics, Samsung Electro-Mechanics, and LG Innotek, have “significantly accelerated” their research and pilot production efforts in glass packaging over the past year. “This trend suggests that the glass substrate ecosystem is evolving from a single early mover to a broader industrial race,” he says.

Other companies are pivoting to play more specialized roles in the glass substrate supply chain. In 2025, JNTC, a company that makes electrical connectors and tempered glass for electronics, established a facility in South Korea that’s capable of producing 10,000 semi-finished glass panels per month. Such panels include drilled holes for vertical electrical connections and thin metal layers coating the glass, but they require additional manufacturing work for installation in chip packages. 

Last year, that South Korean facility began taking orders to supply semi-finished glass to both specialized substrate companies and semiconductor manufacturers. The company plans to expand the facility’s production in 2026 and open an additional manufacturing line in Vietnam in 2027.  Such industry actions show how quickly glass substrate technology is moving from prototype to commercialization—and how many tech players are betting that glass could be a surprisingly strong foundation for the future of computing and AI.