Fibre-optic gear producer, Corning, has set out plans to extend its variety of manufacturing crops in North Carolina, in a take care of Meta Platforms, the father or mother firm of Fb and Instagram. The settlement will see Corning provide its fibre optic expertise to Meta’s information centres.
Meta has reportedly agreed to a deal through which it’ll pay Corning $6 billion between now and 2030. To satisfy the availability calls for of this settlement, Corning plans to broaden its manufacturing facility in Hickory, North Carolina, along with additional unnamed websites within the state.
In response to Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief world affairs officer, Meta chosen Corning for its skill to produce “high-performance fiber optic cables to our AI infrastructure wants.”
The elevated demand for information centres is clear all through the tech business, with firms together with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft investing billions of {dollars} to improve and develop new amenities.
Within the US, Meta has introduced it is going to be spending between $115 billion and $135 billion in 2026 on new information centres. Two of the biggest information centre tasks shall be developed in New Albany, Ohio, and Holly Ridge, Louisiana, based on Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
Corning is likely one of the few survivors of the dot-com period, as demand for its fibre-optic provides soared. Though the corporate skilled a downturn in fortunes as soon as the dot-com bubble burst, it has come again efficiently, with gross sales rising 13% in 2025 and shares climbing 103% in worth throughout the identical interval. With the AI growth now on the forefront of traders’ minds, Corning seems higher positioned than many rivals, drawing on its expertise surviving the dot-com period.
Corning launched a variety of recent merchandise in March 2025, specializing in the emergence of the AI sector. It introduced a set of cables and {hardware} that would “accommodate 36 instances extra fiber connections in a knowledge centre rack unit than a legacy connector.”
As Meta plans to “broaden the scale of [its] infrastructure primarily by information centres, subsea and terrestrial fibre optic cable methods,” Corning might but see elevated and sustained demand for its fibre optic choices.
(Picture supply: “Fiber Optic Globe” by JaredZammit is licensed underneath CC BY-SA 2.0.)
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