Corning And Nvidia Strike Massive AI Fiber Deal

Nvidia and Corning announced a partnership potentially worth tens of billions of dollars, with Corning building three new factories in North Carolina and Texas specifically for Nvidia products. This deal is expected to introduce co-packaged optics, a new technology that could replace the 5,000 copper cables (two miles worth) in Nvidia's AI rack-scale systems with tiny glass fibers. This shift from copper to glass is significant because glass is far more energy-efficient and offers lower latency, allowing faster data transmission between the hundreds of thousands of GPUs in an AI data center. Moving photons through fiber optics uses 5 to 20 times less power than moving electrons through copper. Corning, celebrating its 175th anniversary, is a major supplier of fiber optic cable to companies like Meta, OpenAI, AWS, Microsoft, and Google. This deal with Nvidia, signaling a move towards glass within servers, is expected to further boost demand for Corning's optical communications business. As AI nodes integrate more GPUs, increasing distances will make fiber optics more economical and power-efficient.