A Meta deal just turned this 175-year-old company into a linchpin of the AI data center boom

You might know Corning for its iconic kitchen brands, like Pyrex and CorningWare. You might remember that Thomas Edison relied on the company to develop glass for the light bulb, or that in 1970, Corning invented the first glass fiber that was useful for long-distance communication, while in 2007 Steve Jobs turned to Corning, which is based in Corning, N.Y., to create the hard-to-shatter glass that now wraps every iPhone.

You probably don’t think of it as an AI company, but a new deal with Meta shows how radically the AI boom is reshaping America’s industrial landscape. The 175-year-old Corning, a longtime fixture of the Fortune 500, has reinvented itself once again—this time as a critical supplier to the world’s largest AI data centers.

Meta announced today that it has committed to paying Corning up to $6 billion through 2030 for fiber-optic cable to wire its expanding fleet of AI data centers. In a CNBC interview, Corning CEO Wendell Weeks disclosed that Corning is expanding a North Carolina manufacturing ...