Instead of sending information as electrical signals through copper wire, fiber uses strands of ultra-pure glass—each one thinner than a human hair—to carry data as pulses of light. In AI data centers, fiber optic cable links tens of thousands of GPUs, allowing them to function as a single supercomputer cluster.
Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, told Fortune the Meta deal is “big” for Corning, likely doubling its annual revenue from that one deal alone from under a half-billion to closer to a billion per year once the plant is fully ramped up.
The deal also likely won’t be the last one for Corning, as hyperscalers look to lock in supply. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft do a similar Corning deal, because a lot of these data center investors are moving past plant construction and they really fear that shortages are going to show up once they get to that next stage,” Boloor said.
That bubble burst the following year, sending the company’s stock price plummeting from some $100 to $1. But even when Corning lost 99% of its value and had to lay off half its employees, Weeks continued to develop the company’s fiber tech, which is continuing to pay off during the AI data center boom. Over the past six months, Corning’s stock has risen over 100%.
The Meta deal comes at a moment when power has become the biggest bottleneck for hyperscalers, said Boloor, pushing companies to do everything they can to work around a constraint that is only getting worse. Today’s AI data centers pack racks of GPUs that must be physically connected at what he calls “insane speeds.”
“Electricity does not move through air, and data does not teleport between racks—the power flows through copper, and the data flows through fiber,” he explained. As AI inference—the day-to-day output of models—booms, the “amount of fiber per data center is going to explode.”
