Nvidia, Corning partner on three new optical factories NC, Texas

Nvidia, the chipmaker at the center of the artificial intelligence boom, is partnering with glassmaker Corning for three new advanced manufacturing facilities in North Carolina and Texas dedicated entirely to optical technologies for the world’s most valuable semiconductor company.

The factories will lead to the creation of at least 3,000 jobs and increase Corning’s U.S. optical manufacturing capacity by tenfold, the companies said in a joint press release Wednesday.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

Corning shares climbed 10% on the news. Nvidia stock gained more than 4%.

The deal gives Nvidia the right to invest up to $2.7 billion in Corning. Nvidia is getting warrants to buy up to 15 million shares of Corning common stock at an exercise price of $180 per share, above Tuesday’s closing price of $162.10 but below the price after the pop.

In addition, Nvidia has a pre-funded warrant to buy up to 3 million shares of Corning common stock for an aggregate purchase price of $500 million.

The multiyear deal brings together two infrastructure players that have seen their fortunes skyrocket since the launch in 2022 of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which sparked an explosion of investments into new processors and systems for powering cutting-edge AI models and workloads. While the two companies didn’t provide specifics about what’s being developed, Nvidia is likely gearing up to replace copper with Corning’s optical glass fibers in its AI rack-scale systems, an integration known as co-packaged optics.

At Nvidia’s GTC conference in 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called co-packaged optics essential for the AI build-out.

“What Nvidia is doing is nothing short of extraordinary, not just for the future of AI, but for the American advanced manufacturing workforce,” Corning CEO Wendell Weeks said in a press release.

Corning’s stock is up more than 250% in the past year as of Tuesday’s close, driven by the 175-year-old company’s rapid pivot into the new economy. In January, Meta announced it would spend up to $6 billion as the flagship customer helping Corning build out its optical cable plant in Hickory, North Carolina, an expansion that’s expected to create around 1,000 jobs.

Nvidia cemented its position in the AI market much earlier, as its graphics processing units are key to the development of large language models and for giving tech giants like Alphabet and Meta the ability to massively scale up their data centers. Nvidia’s stock price has climbed roughly 14-fold in the past five years, but the rally has slowed of late as investors have spread their bets across the wider swath of AI infrastructure companies, backing chipmaker Intel and memory provider Micron as well as Corning.

Analysts have long awaited Nvidia’s large-scale deployment of co-packaged optics because the technology promises to…