Meta will pay Corning up to $6 billion for fiber-optic cable as AI data centers scale, reviving a 175-year-old glassmaker at the center of the AI boom.
As Meta races to build massive data centers to support its artificial intelligence ambitions, it is turning to an unlikely partner: Corning, a 175-year-old manufacturer best known for glass.
Meta has committed to paying Corning as much as $6 billion through 2030 for fiber-optic cable to be used in its AI data centers, Corning’s chief executive, Wendell Weeks, said in an interview with CNBC. The agreement underscores how the AI boom is reshaping supply chains far beyond Silicon Valley, pulling legacy industrial players into the center of a historic infrastructure buildout.
Investors reacted swiftly. Corning’s shares jumped 16 percent on the news, the company’s strongest single-day gain in more than two decades.
Corning is expanding its fiber-optic cable plant in Hickory, North Carolina, to meet demand not only from Meta but also from other major AI spenders, including Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Once completed, Corning says the facility will be the largest fiber-optic cable plant in the world.
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“Almost every phone call I get from customers is about how we can deliver more,” Weeks said. “Next year, the hyperscalers will likely be our biggest customers.”
Once a boom-and-bust symbol of the dot-com era, Corning has seen its fortunes revived. Its shares have risen more than 75 percent over the past year, driven by optical communications, now its largest and fastest-growing business segment. The company is part of a widening circle of suppliers benefiting from the AI-driven overhaul of data center infrastructure.
Meta’s strategy, by contrast, has drawn skepticism on Wall Street. The company’s stock underperformed the broader market in 2025 and suffered its worst single-day drop in three years last October after announcing aggressive AI spending without a clear monetization plan. In November, Meta said it would invest up to $600 billion in the United States by 2028 on data centers and related infrastructure—an effort that includes Corning’s fiber.
Meta plans to build 30 data centers, 26 of them in the United States. Two of the largest now under construction are the one-gigawatt Prometheus site in New Albany, Ohio, and the five-gigawatt Hyperion facility in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Both will use Corning fiber under the new agreement.
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“We want a domestic supply chain that can support that scale,” said Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer. Addressing concerns that China could outpace the United States in AI, Kaplan said failing to make the right investments posed a “real risk.”
Corning is no stranger to technology cycles. The company thrived during the late-1990s internet boom as demand for communications equipment surged, only to see its stock collapse by more than 90 percent after 2000. Weeks said the lesson from that era was clear: innovation alone is not enough.
Still, he expressed confidence that the current demand will endure. Fiber-optic usage has grown at an average annual rate of about 7 percent, he said, adding that Corning’s diversified portfolio—spanning consumer electronics, automotive glass, and pharmaceutical packaging—helps buffer volatility.
“We’re built to withstand bad weather,” Weeks said.
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Analysts remain cautious but constructive. Meta Marshall, a networking analyst at Morgan Stanley, said fiber demand can be volatile, but Corning is well-positioned to manage through cycles, given its broad exposure to televisions, smartphones, vehicles, and medical products.
Corning’s reinvention has been constant. Founded during the Gold Rush era, the company supplied glass for Thomas Edison’s early light bulbs, later expanding into Pyrex cookware, automotive components, spacecraft windows, television screens, and vials used for COVID-19 vaccines. Since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Apple has been a key customer, relying on Corning glass for its devices. Last August, Apple announced a $2.5 billion deal to manufacture all cover glass for the iPhone and Apple Watch at a Corning facility in Kentucky.
Fiber optics remains Corning’s most consequential innovation. In 1970, the company invented the first glass fiber suitable for long-distance communication. Today, fiber-based broadband forms the backbone of the global internet, linking continents, data centers, businesses, and homes.
AI is intensifying that demand. Unlike traditional cloud infrastructure, AI data centers require vastly more internal connectivity. Corning’s optical communications revenue jumped 33 percent in the third quarter to $1.65 billion, while enterprise optical sales surged 58 percent, driven bythe adoption of products designed specifically for generative AI workloads.
Weeks likened the architecture of AI networks to neural systems. “It’s a whole separate network,” he said, “trying to create connections like the neurons in your brain.”
To meet those needs, Corning has developed a new fiber-optic product called Contour, engineered to pack twice as many strands into standard conduits while reducing connector complexity. Development began more than five years ago, Weeks said, after conversations with early leaders in generative AI who warned that compute demand would scale far faster than expected.
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Corning has now produced more than 1.3 billion miles of optical fiber. Meta’s Louisiana data center alone will require an estimated 8 million miles. Keeping pace, Weeks said, is the company’s central challenge.
Eventually, he added, fiber may replace copper even inside server racks—particularly as the number of graphics processors per rack climbs into the hundreds. At that scale, fiber optics becomes not only faster, but significantly more power-efficient.
Corning and Meta are scheduled to report fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
