GlobalFoundries Tops Out Dresden Fab Expansion and Unveils FDX Fusion

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

SPRINT Expansion Construction Milestone

Under the SPRINT project, GlobalFoundries is investing €1.1 billion to expand manufacturing 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, which the company said would make Dresden Europe’s largest foundry site. GF said the additional capacity will support its differentiated technologies for automotive, aerospace, industrial IoT and defense applications.

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

Tim Breen, CEO of GlobalFoundries, said Europe’s industrial base depends on chips that have to be available, trusted and built close to the customers who rely on them. “SPRINT expands that capacity in Dresden while giving customers a path to the next generation of energy-efficient computing for Physical AI,” he said. Dr. Manfred Horstmann, general manager and senior vice president at GlobalFoundries, described the project as an investment in Germany’s future as an industrial and innovation location and in resilient European supply chains.

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

Dresden Site and the 2025 Announcement

GlobalFoundries employs around 3,000 people in Dresden and operates approximately 60,000 square meters of cleanroom and laboratory space, with current annual production capacity of up to 950,000 300mm wafers depending on product mix. The company has invested more than €10 billion in Dresden since 2009, which it describes as one of the largest industrial investments in Germany.

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

FDX Fusion Platform and Development Timeline

At the ceremony, GF also announced plans to develop and manufacture 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 aim of delivering energy-efficient processing, sensing, real-time control and secure connectivity within a single technology.

In a separate roadmap release published the same day, GF described FDX Fusion as purpose-built for STAC (Sense, Think, Act, Communicate) 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 deliver more than 2x density improvement over first-generation FDX technology, alongside RF performance up to 0.5 THz ft/fmax, low-leakage operation, in-memory computing capabilities, embedded 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 power-efficient Physical AI applications.

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

Partner statements accompanied the roadmap release. 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 communication products. CEA-Leti CEO Sébastien Dauvé said the institute’s FAMES pilot line continues to shape the future European roadmap for FD-SOI. Executives from Bosch, NXP, Siemens and Tesla, together with a statement from BMW, pointed to requirements spanning robotics, trusted edge processing and supply-chain resilience for Physical AI.

GF plans to commence manufacturing FDX Fusion in 2028 at its Dresden facility. Demonstrator silicon is targeted for early customer evaluation in early 2027, with an initial process design kit planned for mid-2027, and the company said the platform will include optimized process flow and cost structures for rapid prototyping. GF Dresden intends to pursue the technology’s development through the upcoming IPCEI Advanced Semiconductor Technologies program, subject to German federal government approval, and noted that the actual start of development work is contingent on that approval.