As Meta attempts to quickly build massive data centers to keep pace with the artificial intelligence craze, it turns to a 175-year-old glass manufacturer for help.
Meta agreed to pay Corning up to $6 billion by 2030 for fiber optic cables in its AI data centers, Corning CEO Wendell Weeks told CNBC in an exclusive interview about the deal with a cable plant in Hickory, North Carolina.
Corning is expanding its facilities to meet growing demand from Meta and other big spenders like Nvidia,OpenAI, Google, Amazon And Microsoft as part of an extensive industrial development that reaches billions of dollars. Once the project is complete, Corning says it will be the largest fiber optic cable factory in the world.
“Almost every phone call I get from my clients is about how can we attract them more? Weeks said. “I think next year, hyperscalers will be our biggest customers.”
Shares of Corning, once a boom-and-bust era of the Internet age, are up more than 75% over the past year, with optical communications the company’s largest and fastest-growing business segment. Corning is part of a broader group of vendors participating in the data center boom, which is seeing historic levels of demand as the stack is refreshed for the AI era.
Meta’s AI strategy, on the other hand, has perplexed Wall Street. The stock, which underperformed the market in 2025, experienced its worst day in three years in October, after the company announced ambitious AI spending but without a clear monetization plan. The following month, Meta pledged to spend $600 billion in the United States by 2028 on the data centers and infrastructure they need. Corning is one of them.
Meta’s plan for 30 data centers includes 26 facilities in the United States
“We want to have a domestic supply chain available to support that,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s director of global affairs, said in an interview.
Responding to concerns that China could win the AI race, Kaplan said: “If we as a country don’t make the right policy choices and the right investments, that poses a real risk. »
Two of Meta’s largest data centers currently under construction are its Prometheus one gigawatt site in New Albany, Ohio, and five gigawatts Hyperion site in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Both will include Corning fiber optic cable as part of the new deal.
Meta’s 5-gigawatt “Hyperion” data center under construction in Richland Parish, Louisiana, January 9, 2026.
Meta
Having lived through a previous tech bubble, Corning is familiar with the narrative emerging in some parts of the market, with skeptics wondering whether this whole construct will turn into sustainable new businesses. AI announced over $1 trillion in IT transactions in 2025, leading some industry experts to predict the formation of a new bubble.
Fiber brought Corning huge success in the dot-com boom due to demand for communications equipment. The stock rose about eight-fold from early 1997 to its peak in September 2000, before losing more than 90 percent of its value during a market collapse that lasted about two years.
“What we learned then is that it’s not enough to make big innovations,” Weeks said.
As for current data center construction and the possibility of a slowdown, Weeks said demand for fiber optics has been growing about 7% per year on average, “so we’ll find a good use for it.”
He said he was also not “concerned about Meta’s success in this space” because “ultimately, technical excellence, willingness to engage in infrastructure and compute matters.”
“Built to withstand the elements”The key to Corning’s confidence level is that its businesses are diversified, with “some more stable, high-cash flow businesses in our mix.”
“We’re built to withstand bad weather,” Weeks said.
Meta Marshall, a networking equipment analyst at Morgan Stanley, said that “there is volatility on the fiber side” but that Corning can probably get through it.
“The market will always need televisions, telephones, cars, auto windows and medicine bottles,” said Marshall, who has the equivalent of a hold rating on the stock.
Corning had to reinvent yourself again and again to get there.
Founded during the Gold Rush era, the company made glass for Edison’s light bulbs in the late 1870s, and over the next decades expanded into Pyrex cookware, car filters, spacecraft windows, television screens and vials for Covid vaccines.
Since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Apple has been a key customer, relying on Corning’s glass for its flagship device. Apple announced a $2.5 billion agreement in August to manufacture all protective glass for the iPhone and Apple Watch at a Corning factory in Harrodsburg, Kentucky.
In 1970, Corning invented the first fiberglass useful for long-distance communications. Fiber-based broadband makes up the majority of the Internet’s backbone.with billions of kilometers of cable connect the continentsdata centers, businesses and homes.
Ultrapure glass begins the stretching process to form a very thin piece of fiber, melting and falling several floors from the furnace above, at the Corning fiber plant in Concord, North Carolina, January 8, 2026.
Madeleine Petrova
Fiber can transmit data at almost the speed of light. Unlike traditional copper telephone lines that transmit information in the form of electrical signals, fiber optic cables are tiny, bendable strands of glass through which data is sent in the form of photons (lasers that emit pulses of light) at a much higher speed, using less energy.
“Moving photons uses between five and 20 times less energy than moving electrons,” Weeks said. “As power becomes a bigger and bigger problem, fiber inevitably gets closer and closer to computing.”
“You need to put in place a lot more capacity”Demand for Corning fiber has soared recently, in part because AI data centers require more fiber than traditional cloud computing infrastructure. Revenue from Corning’s optical communications business, which includes fiber, jumped 33% in the third quarter to $1.65 billion, while total sales rose 14% to $4.27 billion. Corning stated in its publication of results that sales of optical communications to businesses soared 58% during the quarter, “led by continued strong adoption of Corning’s new Gen AI products.”
Weeks described it as an “entirely distinct network” that “tries to create connections like there are between neurons in your brain.”
All of these connections require so much fiber that Corning invented a whole new type specifically for AI, called Outline. Weeks’ name is on the patent. He showed CNBC the new cable that allows twice as many fiber strands to be inserted into standard-size conduit and reduces a set of 16 connectors to just one.
Corning CEO Wendell Weeks demonstrated to CNBC Contour, its new smaller, denser fiber optic cable invented specifically for AI, at its cable plant in Hickory, North Carolina, on January 9, 2026.
Madeleine Petrova
Weeks told CNBC that development of the new AI products began more than five years ago, well before 2022. ChatGPT debutfollowing a conversation he had with a leader in generative AI.
“They were saying, ‘Look, you need to put in a lot more capacity,'” Weeks recalled, without naming the person. “He says, ‘No, you absolutely don’t understand. This is what’s going to happen and how much calculation will be required, how the scaling laws work.'”
Mike O’Day, head of fiber optics at Corning, told CNBC that the company has now manufactured more than 1.3 billion miles of fiber optics. Weeks says 8 million miles will be needed just for the Meta data center in Louisiana. Keeping up with demand is Corning’s current challenge.
This could become even more difficult as fiber eventually replaces copper in server racks like those used by Nvidia. Copper cables still dominate when it comes to connecting chips indoors a server, but Weeks says the move to fiber is “inevitable” once the number of GPUs in each rack reaches the hundreds.
At this scale of connectivity, Weeks said, “fiber becomes much more economical and much more energy efficient.”
Corning and Meta both report fourth-quarter results on Wednesday.
Watch: Inside the world’s largest fiber factory, where Corning is winning the AI infrastructure boom
CNBC’s Katie Tarasov tours Corning’s largest fiber optic facility in the world with Mike O’Day, fiber optic business manager, in Concord, North Carolina, January 8, 2026.
Madeleine Petrova