Nvidia, the semiconductor leader fueling the artificial intelligence surge, has teamed up with Corning, a glass manufacturer, to construct three new advanced manufacturing plants in North Carolina and Texas. These facilities will focus exclusively on optical technologies for Nvidia, the world’s most valuable semiconductor company.

The initiative will generate at least 3,000 new jobs and boost Corning’s U.S. optical manufacturing capacity tenfold, according to a joint statement released Wednesday.

The financial details of the agreement were not made public. Following the announcement, Corning’s stock jumped 14%, while Nvidia’s shares rose nearly 3%.

This multi-year collaboration unites two infrastructure giants whose fortunes have surged since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, triggering massive investments in new processors and systems for cutting-edge AI models and workloads. Although specifics about the technology remain undisclosed, Nvidia is likely preparing to substitute copper with Corning’s optical glass fibers in its AI rack-scale systems, a method known as co-packaged optics.

During Nvidia’s GTC conference in 2025, CEO Jensen Huang emphasized that co-packaged optics are crucial for AI infrastructure development.

«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 stated in a press release.

Corning’s stock has surged over 250% in the past year as of Tuesday’s close, reflecting the 175-year-old company’s swift transition into the new economy. In January, Meta announced it would invest up to $6 billion as its primary customer to support Corning’s optical cable plant expansion in Hickory, North Carolina, which is projected to create approximately 1,000 jobs.

Nvidia established its dominance in the AI market earlier, as its graphics processing units are vital for developing large language models and enabling tech giants like Alphabet and Meta to scale their data centers. Nvidia’s stock price has increased roughly 14-fold over the past five years, but the rally has recently slowed as investors diversify their bets across a broader range of AI infrastructure companies, including chipmaker Intel, memory provider Micron, and Corning.

Analysts have long anticipated Nvidia’s large-scale deployment of co-packaged optics, as the technology promises to significantly enhance data transfer speeds and reduce energy consumption for AI workloads.

While Corning is renowned for producing display glass for Apple’s iPhone, optical communications remains its largest and fastest-growing business. Since inventing optical fiber for long-range communication in 1970, Corning has supplied millions of miles of cables to connect racks in AI data centers for major industry players.

Replacing copper

Through its partnership with Nvidia, Corning may introduce glass fiber between chips, eventually replacing the 5,000 copper cables within Nvidia’s rack-scale systems like Vera Rubin.

Fiber-optic cables are thin, flexible strands of glass that transmit data as photons at much higher speeds and with less energy than traditional copper wires.

«Moving photons is between five and 20 times lower power usage than moving electrons,» Weeks told Verum in an interview in January.

«You’re bringing the light conversion process right next to the computer chip,» said Vlad Galabov, who covers enterprise infrastructure at research firm Omdia. «Less power is wasted because now you’re traveling a few millimeters, which requires far less energy than traveling across the circuit board.»

Galabov noted that «Nvidia has pushed the entire ecosystem to innovate faster.»

Optical fiber also experiences less signal loss than copper, enabling faster, more reliable communication and reducing the distance required between the hundreds of thousands of GPUs in a data center.

«AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout of our time — and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvigorate American manufacturing and supply chains,» Nvidia’s Huang said in the press release.

«Together with Corning, we are inventing the future of computing with advanced optical technologies —building the foundation for AI infrastructure where intelligence moves at the speed of light while advancing the proud tradition of Made in America.»

Nvidia launched two network switches in 2025 that use similar technologies, placing them adjacent to the primary AI chips. Competitors Broadcom and Marvell have introduced comparable products, while Intel is also developing co-packaged optics solutions.

In March, Nvidia invested $4 billion in two companies — Coherent and Lumentum — that develop lasers and components to convert data between light and electrical signals, which are then transmitted through Corning’s fiber-optic cables.

Weeks told Verum during an exclusive factory tour in January that he was collaborating with «all the different chip folks on glass core and how glass will be part of semiconductor packaging going forward.»

«As power becomes a bigger and bigger issue, fiber inevitably gets closer and closer to the compute,» Weeks said. As the number of GPUs in a server climbs into the hundreds, he added, «the distances will climb, and when those distances climb up, fiber optics become much more economical and much more power efficient.»

Corning is hosting an investor day at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, a day before celebrating its 175th anniversary by ringing the closing bell.

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