You may know Corning from iconic kitchen brands like Pyrex and Corningware. You may remember that Thomas Edison turned to the company to develop glass for light bulbs, that in 1970 Corning invented the first fiberglass to help with long-distance communications, and that in 2007 Steve Jobs turned to Corning, New York-based Corning to develop the shatter-resistant glass that now encases every iPhone.
You probably don’t think of Meta as an AI company, but its new deal shows how the AI boom is fundamentally reshaping America’s industrial landscape. Corning, a 175-year-old company that is a fixture among Fortune 500 companies, has reinvented itself once again. This time, as a key supplier to the world’s largest AI data center.
Meta today announced that it has committed to pay Corning up to $6 billion by 2030 for fiber-optic cables to wire its growing fleet of AI data centers. In an interview with CNBC, Corning CEO Wendell Weeks said Corning is expanding its manufacturing facility in North Carolina to meet growing demand from Meta and other companies such as Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Corning says the project, funded by Meta, will be the world’s largest fiber-optic cable plant when completed. Corning’s stock price soared 16% on the news.
Instead of transmitting information as electrical signals over copper wire, fiber uses strands of ultra-pure glass that are thinner than a human hair to transmit data as pulses of light. In AI datacenters, fiber optic cables link tens of thousands of GPUs, allowing them to function as a single supercomputer cluster.
said Shay Boroa, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities. luck The Meta deal is “major” for Corning, with the deal alone potentially doubling its annual revenue from less than $500 million to nearly $1 billion once the factory is fully operational.
This deal also likely won’t be Corning’s last as the hyperscaler looks to secure supply. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft does a similar deal with Corning, because a lot of these data center investors have moved past factory construction and are really afraid that once they get to the next stage, there will be a shortage,” Volois said.
As my colleague Kristin Stoller reported, luck The past year hasn’t always been smooth sailing for Corning. In the 1990s, Mr. Weeks was a vice president at Corning Corporation and was selected to run a new fiber-optic business to power the burgeoning Internet. This innovation boosted Corning’s valuation to nearly $100 billion in 2000, at the height of the Internet bubble.
The bubble burst the following year, and the company’s stock price plummeted from about $100 to $1. But even as Corning lost 99% of its value and had to lay off half its employees, Weeks continued to develop the company’s fiber technology, which continues to pay dividends amid the AI data center boom. Over the past six months, Corning stock has increased more than 100%.
Bolor said the meta deal comes at a time when power is the biggest bottleneck for hyperscalers, and he is calling on companies to do everything in their power to avoid constraints that are only getting worse. Today’s AI data centers are packed with racks of GPUs that must be physically connected at what he calls “insane speeds.”
“Electricity doesn’t travel through the air and data doesn’t teleport between racks. Power flows through copper wire and data flows through fiber,” he explained. As AI inference (the daily output of models) proliferates, “the amount of fiber per data center will explode.”
