On Thursday, GlobalFoundries (GFS), a global leader in feature-rich semiconductor manufacturing, listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, raising nearly $2.6 billion in its initial public offering (IPO). The new listing, which comes amid a global chip shortage, marked Nasdaq’s largest U.S. IPO by proceeds raised in 2021 and the largest semiconductor IPO in its history.

“At GlobalFoundries, we innovate and partner with our customers to manufacture feature-rich semiconductors that help connect and power many of the products you touch every day,” said David Reeder, Chief Financial Officer at GlobalFoundries. “Listing on the Nasdaq is the next step in our maturation as a company. The funds from this IPO will go a long way toward helping satisfy our customers’ needs.”

GlobalFoundries’ record-setting IPO builds upon Nasdaq’s strong IPO momentum. Through the first three quarters of 2021, Nasdaq has welcomed more than 560 listings through the traditional IPO process, special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) and direct listings, raising $136 billion. 

GlobalFoundries, which was spun off from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in 2009, is the world’s third-largest foundry based on revenue. In 2020, the company reported revenue of $5.7 billion. As demand for chips surged in 2021, GlobalFoundries’ net revenue for the first half of the year was $3.04 billion, an increase of about 13% from a year earlier. Some of the company’s largest customers include several Nasdaq-listed companies, such as Qualcomm (QCOM), NXP Semiconductors (NXPI), AMD and Broadcom (AVGO).

“When we think about all of the electronics people use and rely on daily—cell phones, laptops, automobiles—we usually don’t stop to think about what makes them tick. As one of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers, GlobalFoundries delivers the chips that power these and thousands of other critically important computer systems and devices,” Nasdaq Stock Exchange President Nelson Griggs said during the opening bell ceremony. “Through constant innovation, [GlobalFoundries has] been able to build feature-rich technology that makes these chips even more secure, intelligent and power-efficient.”

Reeder believes that the industry is poised for further growth, expecting it to double in the next decade. He noted that there has been a pervasive deployment of semiconductors to almost every facet of life in recent years, from phones and watches to coffee makers and cars, accelerating the need for chips in an increasingly connected world.  

“What excites me most about [GlobalFoundries’] future is that we’re really only just getting started,” Reeder said. “We’re only in the third year of our strategic transformation—that transformation to focus on the pervasive semiconductor market with connectivity and power and embedded memory and numerous other features.”

As the only at-scale foundry that manufactures on three continents, GlobalFoundries has the geographic diversity to secure its supply chain, as well as the cultural diversity to better understand the needs of its global customers.