- Corning is building three plants in North Carolina and Texas
- Nvidia is investing $500 million in Corning
- Corning's CEO talked about the company more generally today at a Wall Street investor event
Corning today said that it has partnered with Nvidia, and it’s building three new manufacturing plants in the U.S. in North Carolina and Texas.
The plants will increase Corning’s U.S.-based optical connectivity manufacturing capacity by 10x and expand its U.S. fiber production capacity by more than 50% to meet the accelerating demand driven by AI factory buildouts.
A Corning 8K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) today said Nvidia is investing $500 million in Corning and has the right to purchase up to 15 million shares of Corning stock at $180 per share.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said in a statement, “AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout of our time. Together with Corning, we are inventing the future of computing with advanced optical technologies – building the foundation for AI infrastructure where intelligence moves at the speed of light while advancing the proud tradition of Made in America.”
Corning held an investor event at the New York Stock Exchange today, where its executives primarily talked about its Springboard plan, but they also answered a few questions about the Nvidia partnership.
Wendell Weeks, Corning chairman, CEO and president, said the deal with Nvidia underpins Corning’s photonics market access platform to create the right optical technology to interact with switch ASICs and Nvidia’s GPUs. “That gives you deep insight as to what has to happen to the overall system to deliver the light between those pieces,” said Weeks. “You can expect us to be working to fundamentally reinvent the optical systems here as we go forward through the coming generations of product.”
Corning’s Springboard plan
The Springboard plan is essentially a multi-year corporate growth strategy, which the company launched in late 2023 to accelerate revenue, profits and cash flow.
Weeks said today, “Corning is entering a new phase of accelerated organic growth in 2027. We are upgrading and extending our Springboard plan to achieve a $40 billion annualized sales run rate by 2030.”
The company expects to reach a target of a $20 billion annualized sales run rate by the end of 2026, delivering a 15% sales compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from Q4 2023 to Q4 2026.
An investor today asked Michael O’Day, SVP and general manager, Optical Communications for Corning, where the company stands in the competitive landscape.
O’Day said, “As you know, we are a vertically integrated passive optical supplier. We make the fiber, the cable and the connectivity. There's inherent value competitively to being integrated in all three because we can invent, and we can apply our capacity and our people in the areas where most of the demand may sit.”
He touted Corning’s work in the past few years to focus on optical products with more density in a smaller footprint.
At the OFC show in March, Corning touted its multi-core fiber technology, where instead of one optical core, it integrates four cores into a single strand, enabling a step change in bandwidth.
And for its work inside the data center, Corning displayed stacks of servers where it’s now packing in more fibers to connect those servers to racks of switches.