NVIDIA–Corning Optical Network Expansion 10x, 3 New Plants

According to an official joint announcement, NVIDIA Corporation and Corning Incorporated have entered into a long-term strategic partnership to expand advanced optical interconnect solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure manufacturing in the United States.

Under the agreement, Corning will significantly scale its domestic production capacity, increasing U.S.-based optical connectivity manufacturing output by 10 times and expanding local fiber production capacity by more than 50%. This large-scale expansion is designed to meet the rapidly growing demand for high-performance transmission components driven by next-generation AI factories and hyperscale data center deployments. As part of this initiative, Corning will establish three new advanced manufacturing facilities in North Carolina and Texas.

The collaboration is also expected to generate more than 3,000 high-skilled manufacturing jobs, reinforcing the role of advanced semiconductor-adjacent and photonics manufacturing within the U.S. industrial ecosystem. As AI workloads increasingly rely on massive parallel computing architectures, modern data centers require thousands of GPUs working in coordination. This has created unprecedented demand for high-bandwidth, low-latency data transmission technologies, including optical fiber, high-speed connectivity systems, and photonic components.

Optical interconnect technology has therefore become a critical foundation of AI infrastructure, enabling efficient data movement across increasingly complex and distributed computing environments. Without scalable optical networking solutions, the performance of large-scale AI systems would be significantly constrained.

NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang emphasized that AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout in modern computing history, reshaping both supply chains and advanced manufacturing strategies. Through this partnership, NVIDIA and Corning aim to strengthen the technological foundation required for the next generation of AI systems.

Corning Chairman and CEO Wendell P. Weeks highlighted that the collaboration directly accelerates the company’s expansion of U.S. manufacturing capabilities, underscoring how AI is not only transforming software and computing, but also reshaping advanced materials and industrial production. The investment is intended to ensure that critical technologies powering AI systems are increasingly developed and manufactured domestically, supporting long-term supply chain resilience and innovation capacity.