There are good reasons why a company of Nvidia’s stature would want to collaborate with a company like Corning, specialists in manufacturing the glass that protects our mobile phones. Corning offers more products than your Gorilla Glassand that is precisely what Jensen Huang’s company is interested in. And it is that Nvidia is going to invest about 3.2 billion dollars at the glass manufacturer with the intention of multiplying the optical connectivity production capacity on US soil tenfold.
What’s on the table. The financial scope of the agreement has been revealed in parts. It was initially announced that Nvidia would receive warrants (stock purchase rights) to acquire up to 15 million Corning shares at a price of $180 per share, representing a potential investment of up to $3.2 billion. Added to this is a pre-financed warrant for another additional 500 million.
But the CEO of Nvidia confirmed on CNBC that the company has also made “a prepayment of several billion dollars” to finance the construction of the new factories, a figure that was not part of the initial official announcement and whose exact amount has not been made public either.
Fiber optics are the thing. The data centers that power AI They house hundreds of thousands of GPUs that must communicate with each other continuously and at high speed. For decades, this communication has been carried out using copper cables, and in fact for short-distance connections within the rack (from the server to the switch), they are still used, but fiber optics end up being superior in everything, both in terms of speed, energy consumption and lower signal loss.
Which Nvidia has in mind. The technical term at the center of this agreement is co-packaged optics, which refers to the integration of glass fiber directly into chip systems, progressively replacing copper cables. Inside Nvidia rack systems (such as the Vera Rubin) there are currently about 5,000 copper cables that could be replaced by Corning fiber optics.
Already at last year’s GTC, Huang rated this technology “essential for the deployment of AI.” The company has been preparing the ground for months: in March invested $4 billion in Coherent and Lumentumtwo companies specializing in lasers and components that convert data between light and electrical signals, which then travel through Corning fiber cables.
Who else is in the race. Nvidia is not the only one betting on this technology. Its competitors Broadcom and Marvell They have already launched similar productsand Intel also develops its own co-integrated optics solutions. For its part, Corning already had Meta as a reference client. In fact, Zuckerberg’s company announced an agreement of up to 6 billion dollars for Corning to expand its optical cables plant in Hickory, North Carolina. The alliance with Nvidia now adds three more facilities and multiplies the company’s optical connectivity manufacturing capacity in the United States by ten, in addition to increasing its fiber production by more than 50%.
““Made in America”. The agreement comes precisely at a time when the Trump administration is pushing to relocate technological supply chains that have been built for decades in Asia (Taiwan, China or Vietnam). Huang counted to CNBC that “it is an extraordinary opportunity to reinvest and revitalize American manufacturing for the first time in generations.”
According to the CEO of NVIDIA, the tech sector would not be the only one to benefit, since the construction and operation of these data centers generates demand for electricians, construction workers, chip manufacturing operators and infrastructure specialists. “The skilled worker shortage and demand are incredibly high,” mentioned Huang in the middle.
Converted company. Corning has become another of those companies that have seen their business benefit from the AI boom. And the signature accumulates an increase of more than 300% in the last year, driven by its repositioning towards the AI market and moving away from its best-known image as a manufacturer of glass for mobile screens.
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