A Meta deal just turned this 175-year-old company into a linchpin of the AI data center boom
You might know Corning for its iconic kitchen brands, like Pyrex and CorningWare. You might remember that Thomas Edison relied on the company to develop glass for the light bulb, or that in 1970, Corning invented the first glass fiber that was useful for long-distance communication, while in 2007 Steve Jobs turned to Corning, which is based in Corning, N.Y., to create the hard-to-shatter glass that now wraps every iPhone.
You probably don’t think of it as an AI company, but a new deal with Meta shows how radically the AI boom is reshaping America’s industrial landscape. The 175-year-old Corning, a longtime fixture of the Fortune 500, has reinvented itself once again—this time as a critical supplier to the world’s largest AI data centers.
Meta announced today that it has committed to paying Corning up to $6 billion through 2030 for fiber-optic cable to wire its expanding fleet of AI data centers. In a CNBC interview, Corning CEO Wendell Weeks disclosed that Corning is expanding a North Carolina manufacturing facility to accommodate growing demand from Meta and other companies including Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. When the project is complete—with funding from Meta—Corning says it will be the largest fiber-optic cable plant in the world. The news today sent Corning’s stock soaring 16%.
Instead of sending information as electrical signals through copper wire, fiber uses strands of ultra-pure glass—each one thinner than a human hair—to carry data as pulses of light. In AI data centers, fiber-optic cable links tens of thousands of GPUs, allowing them to function as a single supercomputer cluster.
Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, told Fortune the Meta deal is “big” for Corning, likely doubling its annual revenue from that one deal alone from under a half-billion to closer to a billion per year once the plant is fully ramped up.
The deal also likely won’t be the last one for Corning, as hyperscalers look to lock in supply. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft do a similar Corning deal, because a lot of these data center investors are moving past plant construction, and they really fear that shortages are going to show up once they get to that next stage,” Boloor said.
As my colleague Kristin Stoller reported in Fortune last year, it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for Corning. In the 1990s, Weeks was a Corning vice president tapped to run a new optical fiber business to power the burgeoning internet—an innovation that drove Corning’s valuation to nearly $100 billion at the height of the internet bubble in 2000.
That bubble burst the following year, sending the company’s stock price plummeting from some $100 to $1. But even when Corning lost 99% of its value and had to lay off half its employees, Weeks continued to develop the company’s fiber tech, which is continuing to pay off during the AI data center boom. Over the past six months, Corning’s stock has risen over 100%.
The Meta deal comes at a moment when power has become the biggest bottleneck for hyperscalers, said Boloor, pushing companies to do everything they can to work around a constraint that is only getting worse. Today’s AI data centers pack racks of GPUs that must be physically connected at what he calls “insane speeds.”
“Electricity does not move through air, and data does not teleport between racks—the power flows through copper, and the data flows through fiber,” he explained. As AI inference—the day-to-day output of models—booms, the “amount of fiber per data center is going to explode.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com