Corning’s Selling Fiber-Optic Cables as Fast as It Can Make Them
Everyone wants Corning’s fiber-optic cables (The Wall Street Journal, subscription).
What’s going on: “[I]n the global race to build enough computing power for a future driven by artificial intelligence, Corning’s cables have become the connectors of choice.”
- The 175-year-old company recently signed a $6 billion agreement with Meta to supply the tech firm with fiber-optic cable for data centers.
- And it’s “working on what could be its next big act—fiber that goes inside servers, instead of just connecting them to each other.”
Why it’s happening: Fiber-optic cables use light rather than electricity, and light’s components—photons—can transmit data many times faster than electrons (electricity’s components). This is particularly so over long distances.
How it came about: In 2018, Corning executives visited one of Meta’s data centers and learned that the mix of copper and fiber-optic cables it was using to connect its servers wasn’t working as hoped.
- “This spurred Corning’s engineers to make their cables thinner, but also tougher, so they could withstand tight bends, says Claudio Mazzali, Corning’s head of research. Five years later, ChatGPT made its debut, and demand for fiber-powered data centers exploded.”
In-house specialty: Corning makes almost everything it uses, an approach it calls “the Corning way.”
- “That self-containment also applies to the workforce …. When the company shifts direction, it reassigns engineers rather than laying them off, so they accumulate expertise over decades, across different projects.”