As Meta tries to rapidly construct massive data centers to keep pace with the artificial intelligence craze, it’s turning to a 175-year-old glass manufacturer for help.

Meta has committed to paying Corning up to $6 billion through 2030 for fiber-optic cable in its AI data centers, Corning CEO Wendell Weeks told CNBC in an exclusive interview about the deal from a cable factory in Hickory, North Carolina.

Corning is expanding the facility to accommodate growing demand from Meta and other big spenders like Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Microsoft as part of an extended industry buildout that’s reaching into the trillions of Dollars. When the project is complete, Corning says it will be the largest fiber-optic cable plant in the world.

“Almost every phone call I get from my customers is trying to see, how do we get them more?” Weeks said. “I think next year the hyperscalers will be our biggest customers.”

Shares of Corning, once a boom-and-bust dot-com era story, have risen more than 75% in the last year, with optical communications as the company’s largest and fastest-growing business segment. Corning is among a wider swath of providers to the data center boom seeing historic levels of demand as the stack gets refreshed for the AI age.

Meta’s AI strategy, on the other hand, has puzzled Wall Street. The stock, which underperformed the market in 2025, had its worst day in three years in October after the company announced ambitious AI spending but without a clear monetization plan. The next month, Meta committed to spending $600 billion in the U.S. by 2028, on data centers and the infrastructure they require. Corning is part of that.

Meta’s plan for 30 data centers includes 26 facilities in the U.S.

“We want to have a domestic supply chain that’s available to support that,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, said in an interview.

In addressing concerns that China could win the AI race, Kaplan said, “If we as a country don’t make the right policy choices and the right investments, that’s a real risk.”

Two of Meta’s largest data centers currently under construction are its Prometheus one-gigawatt site in New Albany, Ohio, and five-gigawatt Hyperion site in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Both will include Corning fiber-optic cable as part of the new deal.

Having lived through a prior tech bubble, Corning is familiar with the narrative that’s emerging in parts of the market, with skeptics questioning whether all of this building turns into new, sustainable businesses. AI announced more than $1 trillion in compute deals in 2025, leading some industry experts to predict a new bubble is forming.

Fiber brought Corning huge success in the dot-com boom due to demand for communications equipment. The stock multiplied by about eightfold from the beginning of 1997 through its peak in September 2000, before losing over 90% of its value over a roughly two-year market collapse.

“What we learned then was that it wasn’t enough to do great innovations,” Weeks said.  

With respect to the current data center buildout and the possibility of a slowdown, Weeks said fiber-optic demand has grown at about 7% annually on average, “so we’ll find a good use for it.”

He said he’s also “not concerned about Meta being successful in this space,” because, “In the end, really technical excellence, willingness to commit to the infrastructure, compute matters.”

‘Built to withstand bad weather’

Key to Corning’s level of confidence is that its business is diversified with “some more stable, high cash flow businesses in our mix.”

“We’re built to withstand bad weather,” Weeks said.

Meta Marshall, an analyst covering networking equipment at Morgan Stanley, said “there is volatility on the fiber side,” but that Corning can likely manage through it.

“The market will still need TVs and phones and cars and auto glass and vials for medications,” said Marshall, who has the equivalent of a hold rating on the stock.

Corning has had to re-invent itself time and again to get to this point.

Founded in the gold rush era, the company built glass for Edison’s light bulbs in the late 1870s, and over the following decades moved into Pyrex cookware, car filters, spacecraft windows, TV screens and vials for Covid vaccines. 

Since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Apple has been a key customer, relying on Corning’s glass for its flagship device. Apple announced a $2.5 billion deal in August, to manufacture all the cover glass for the iPhone and Apple Watch at a Corning plant in Harrodsburg, Kentucky.

In 1970, Corning invented the first glass fiber that was useful for long-distance communication. Fiber-based broadband makes up the majority of the internet’s backbone, with billions of miles of cable connecting continents, data centers, businesses and homes.

Fiber can transmit data at nearly the speed of light. Unlike traditional copper phone lines that transmit information as electrical signals, fiber-optic cables are tiny bendable strands of glass through which data is sent as photons — lasers emitting pulses of light — at far higher speed, using less energy. 

“Moving photons is between five and 20 times lower power usage than moving electrons,” Weeks said. “As power becomes a bigger and bigger issue, fiber inevitably gets closer and closer and closer to the compute.”

‘You need to put in a lot more capacity’

Demand for Corning’s fiber has skyrocketed of late in part because AI data centers require more fiber than traditional cloud computing infrastructure. Revenue in Corning’s optical communications business, which includes fiber, jumped 33% in the third quarter to $1.65 billion, while total sales rose 14% to $4.27 billion. Corning said in its earnings release that enterprise sales of optical communications soared 58% in the quarter, “driven by the continued strong adoption of Corning’s new Gen AI products.”

Weeks described it as a “whole separate network” that’s “trying to create the connections just like it is between the neurons in your brain.”

All those connections require so much fiber that Corning invented a brand new type specifically for AI, called Contour. Weeks’ name is on the patent. He showed CNBC the new cable that fits twice as many fiber strands into a standard size conduit, and reduces a set of 16 connectors down to a single one.

Weeks told CNBC development of the new AI products began more than five years ago, long before the 2022 debut of ChatGPT, following a conversation he had with a leader in generative AI.

“They were saying, ‘Listen, you need to put in a lot more capacity,'” Weeks recalled, without naming the person. “He’s like, ‘No, you totally don’t get it. This is what’s going to happen and how much compute is going to be needed, how the scaling laws are working.'”

Mike O’Day, Corning’s head of fiber optics, told CNBC that the company has now made over 1.3 billion miles of optical fiber. Weeks says 8 million miles will be needed in Meta’s Louisiana data center alone. Keeping up with demand is Corning’s current challenge.

It may get even harder as fiber eventually replaces copper inside server racks like those used by Nvidia. Copper cables still dominate when it comes to connecting chips within a server, but Weeks says the change to fiber is “inevitable” once the number of graphics processors in each rack climbs into the hundreds.

At that scale of connectivity, Weeks said, “Fiber optics become much more economical and much more power efficient.”

Corning and Meta both report fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday.

Watch: Inside the world’s largest fiber factory, where Corning is winning the AI infrastructure boom