Securing the optical backbone for the next generation of AI Factories and sovereign compute clusters.
On May 6, 2026, NVIDIA and Corning Incorporated announced a major multiyear partnership to dramatically expand U.S. manufacturing of optical connectivity products. This expansion is essential for the scaling of AI infrastructure, where high-speed data transmission is the primary bottleneck for large-scale training clusters.
Under the terms of the deal, Corning will increase its U.S.-based optical connectivity manufacturing capacity by 10 times. This includes a significant boost to its U.S. fiber production capacity, which is expected to rise by more than 50%. To support this growth, three new advanced manufacturing plants will be built in North Carolina and Texas, creating over 3,000 high-paying American jobs.
The deal is anchored by a $500 million investment from NVIDIA into Corning. This includes options for NVIDIA to purchase up to 15 million shares of Corning stock, signaling a deep strategic alignment between the hardware and physical connectivity layers. As AI models grow to trillions of parameters, the industry is shifting from traditional copper wiring to optical fiber to move data at the "speed of light" with lower power consumption.
Fiber optics has effectively joined compute, data, and power as a critical infrastructure pillar. The partnership addresses the "unprecedented volumes" of high-performance optical fiber and photonics required to connect thousands of GPUs in modern AI data centers. As Jensen Huang described it, this is a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvigorate American manufacturing" while reinventing optical systems for future generations of AI computing.