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

As Meta tries to rapidly construct massive data centers to keep pace with the artificial intelligence craze, it’s turning to a 175-year-old glass manufacturer for help.

Meta has committed to paying Corning up to $6 billion through 2030 for fiber-optic cable in its AI data centers, Corning CEO Wendell Weeks told CNBC in an exclusive interview about the deal from a cable factory in Hickory, North Carolina.

Corning is expanding the facility to accommodate growing demand from Meta and other big spenders like Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Microsoft as part of an extended industry buildout that’s reaching into the trillions of dollars. When the project is complete, Corning says it will be the largest fiber-optic cable plant in the world.

“Almost every phone call I get from my customers is trying to see, how do we get them more?” Weeks said. “I think next year the hyperscalers will be our biggest customers.”

Shares of Corning, once a boom-and-bust dot-com era story, have risen more than 75% in the last year, with optical communications as the company’s largest and fastest-growing business segment. Corning is among a wider swath of providers to the data center boom seeing historic levels of demand as the stack gets refreshed for the AI age.

Meta’s AI strategy, on the other hand, has puzzled Wall Street. The stock, which underperformed the market in 2025, had its worst day in three years in October after the company announced ambitious AI spending but without a clear monetization plan. The next month, Meta committed to spending $600 billion in the U.S. by 2028, on data centers and the infrastructure they require. Corning is part of that.

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

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

In addressing 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’s 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-gigawatt Hyperion site in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Both will include Corning fiber-optic cable as part of the new deal.

Having lived through a prior tech bubble, Corning is familiar with the narrative that’s emerging in parts of the market, with skeptics questioning whether all of this building turns into new, sustainable businesses. AI announced more than $1 trillion in compute deals in 2025, leading some industry experts to predict a new bubble is forming.

Fiber brought Corning huge success in the dot-com boom due to demand for communications equipment. The stock multiplied by about eightfold from the beginning of 1997 through its peak in September 2000, before losing over 90% of its value…