Apple supplier Corning wins $6 billion from Meta for AI fiber optics

Meta is looking to the 175-year-old glass maker for help as it rapidly builds out large data centers to keep up with trends in artificial intelligence.

Meta Corning CEO Wendell Weeks told CNBC in an exclusive interview that the deal from its cable factory in Hickory, North Carolina, promises to pay Corning up to $6 billion by 2030 for fiber-optic cables for AI data centers.

Corning stock soared 17% on the news, its fastest pace since 2003.

Corning is expanding its facilities to meet growing demand from Meta and other big spenders. Nvidiaopen AI, google, Amazon and microsoft As part of a broader multi-trillion dollar industry build-out. When the project is complete, Corning says it will be the world’s largest fiber optic cable factory.

“Almost every call we’ve had from customers has been about how we can get more attention from them,” Weeks said. “I think hyperscalers will be our biggest customers next year.”

Once a boom-and-bust story of the dot-com era, Corning’s stock price rose more than 75% last year as optical communications became the company’s largest and fastest-growing business segment. Corning is one of a wide range of providers in the data center boom that is expected to see historic levels of demand as stacks are modernized for the AI ​​era.

Meanwhile, Meta’s AI strategy is perplexing Wall Street. The company’s stock, which underperformed the market in 2025, had its worst day in three years in October after the company announced an ambitious AI investment but had no clear monetization plan. The following month, Meta pledged to spend $600 billion in the U.S. by 2028 on data centers and the infrastructure they require. Corning is part of that.

Meta’s 30 data center plan includes 26 facilities in the U.S.

“We want to have a domestic supply chain that can support that,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief international affairs officer, said in an interview.

In response to concerns that China could win the AI ​​race, Kaplan said, “If we don’t make the right policy choices and the right investments as a country, that’s a big risk.”

Two of Meta’s largest data centers currently under construction are the 1 GW Prometheus site in New Albany, Ohio, and the 5 GW Hyperion site in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Both products include Corning fiber optic cables as part of the new agreement.

Having lived through past tech bubbles, Corning is well aware of this narrative emerging in some parts of the market, and some are skeptical about whether all this building will turn into a new, sustainable business. AI will announce more than $1 trillion in computing deals in 2025, and some industry experts predict a new bubble is forming.

Demand for communications equipment made fiber a huge success for Corning during the dot-com boom. The stock price rose about eight times from early 1997 to its peak in September 2000, then lost more than 90% of its value during the nearly two-year market collapse.

“What we learned then was that that alone is not enough to create great innovation,” Weeks said.

Regarding the potential for expansion and slowdown of current data centers, Weeks said demand for fiber is growing at an average rate of about 7% per year, “so there will be good uses for it.”

He also said he was “not worried about whether Meta will be successful in this space,” because “ultimately what matters is true technical excellence and a willingness to work on infrastructure and computing.”

“It’s built to withstand bad weather.”

The key to Corning’s level of confidence is that its business is diversified, “including some of the more stable, high-cash-flow businesses.”

“We are built to withstand inclement weather,” Weeks said.

“There’s volatility on the fiber side,” said Mehta Marshall, a networking equipment analyst at Morgan Stanley, who said Corning could probably overcome that.

“The market will continue to need televisions, phones, cars, auto glass and pharmaceutical bottles,” said Marshall, who has a hold rating on the stock.

Corning has had to reinvent itself many times to get to this point.

Founded during the Gold Rush, the company made glass for Edison’s light bulbs in the late 1870s, then branched out over the decades to make Pyrex cookware, car filters, spaceship windows, television screens and vials for coronavirus vaccines.

Since the iPhone was released in 2007, apple is a major customer and uses Corning glass in its flagship devices. In August, Apple announced a $2.5 billion deal to manufacture all cover glass for the iPhone and Apple Watch at its Corning factory in Harrodsburg, Kentucky.

In 1970, Corning invented the first fiberglass to help with long-distance communications. Fiber-based broadband is a large part of the Internet’s backbone, connecting continents, data centers, businesses, and homes with billions of miles of cable.

Fibers can transmit data at nearly the speed of light. Unlike traditional copper telephone lines, which transmit information as electrical signals, fiber optic cables are small, bendable bundles of glass, and data is transmitted as photons (lasers that emit pulses of light) with less energy and much faster.

“Moving photons uses five to 20 times less power than moving electrons,” Weeks said. “As the power problem becomes more and more important, fiber will inevitably move closer and closer to computing.”

“We need more capacity.”

The recent surge in demand for Corning’s fiber is in part because AI data centers require more fiber than traditional cloud computing infrastructure. Revenue from Corning’s optical communications business (including fiber) rose 33% to $1.65 billion in the third quarter, with total revenue up 14% to $4.27 billion. Corning said in its earnings call that enterprise optical communications revenue surged 58% in the quarter “due to continued strong adoption of Corning’s new generation AI products.”

Weeks described this as a “completely separate network” that is “trying to establish connections similar to the connections between neurons in the brain.”

All these connections require so many fibers that Corning invented an entirely new type called Contour specifically for AI. Weeks’ name appears on the patent. He showed CNBC a new cable that fits twice as many bare fibers into a standard-sized conduit and reduces a set of 16 connectors to one.

Weeks told CNBC that development of the new AI product began more than five years ago, long before ChatGPT debuted in 2022, after conversations with leaders in generative AI.

“They said, ‘Listen, we need to bring in more talent,'” Weeks said, declining to name the person. “He was like, ‘No, I don’t understand it at all. This is what’s going to happen, how much computing is going to be needed, how are the laws of scaling going to work?'”

Mike O’Day, head of Corning’s fiber optic division, told CNBC that the company currently manufactures more than 1.3 billion miles of optical fiber. Meta’s Louisiana data center alone will require 8 million miles, Weeks said. Continuing to meet demand is Corning’s current challenge.

Eventually, that could become even more difficult as fiber replaces copper in server racks like the one Nvidia uses. Copper cables are still the dominant way to connect chips in servers, but as the number of graphics processors in each rack reaches the hundreds, the switch to fiber is “inevitable,” Weeks said.

For connections of this scale, “fiber is much more economical and much more power efficient,” Weeks said.

Corning and Meta will both report fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday.

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