“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 …