Tower Semiconductor is a specialty foundry with manufacturing facilities in Israel, the US, Italy, and Japan, producing chips for analog, RF, power, and silicon photonics applications. Unlike leading-edge foundries competing on transistor density, Tower differentiates on process specialization by offering manufacturing platforms for applications where functional requirements cannot be met by pure digital CMOS processes alone. This includes high-voltage analog circuits, RF transceivers, image sensors, and silicon photonics.

Silicon photonics has become increasingly relevant to AI infrastructure as data center networking has scaled to bandwidth levels where electrical links between racks are no longer sufficient. Silicon photonics-based transceivers—integrating optical components directly on a silicon chip—offer a path to lower-cost, higher-density optical interconnects at 800G and 1.6T speeds. Tower's silicon photonics platform enables these components to be manufactured on a standard wafer production line, and the company has been investing in this process capability to serve AI networking customers.

Tower signed multi-year supply agreements with AI networking customers for silicon photonics-based components in 2025 and is expanding its analog and RF capabilities for AI-adjacent applications in sensing and communications. Tower's specialty positioning—serving applications requiring process capabilities outside the standard digital logic roadmap—gives it a distinct role in the AI hardware supply chain, focused on the photonic and analog components supporting AI networking.