Input Stories

North Carolina and Texas are set to land major new manufacturing investments as chipmaker NVIDIA and glassmaker Corning expand U.S. production of critical AI infrastructure components—moves expected to create thousands of manufacturing jobs.

What’s going on: NVIDIA and Corning are partnering to build three advanced manufacturing facilities in North Carolina and Texas focused on optical connectivity technologies critical to AI infrastructure. The technologies use high-performance optical fiber that moves data to, from and inside AI data servers exponentially faster than copper wires. The expansion is expected to create more than 3,000 manufacturing jobs and increase Corning’s U.S. optical manufacturing capacity tenfold, the companies announced this week (CNBC).

• The announcement reflects the staggering scale of the AI buildout underway—and the increasingly central role manufacturers will play powering it.
• On CNBC’s “Mad Money,” NVIDIA Founder, President and CEO Jensen Huang called AI infrastructure “the single largest infrastructure buildout in human history,” saying the partnership represents an opportunity “to reinvest [and] revitalize American manufacturing for the first time in several generations” while also helping “revitalize the energy grid” (CNBC).
• Corning Chairman and CEO Wendell Weeks framed the effort as part of a broader push to strengthen domestic manufacturing and innovation, saying the partnership is about “inventing the future of computing with advanced optical technologies [and], most importantly, building on the tradition of Made in America.”

AI and jobs: Huang also pushed back against claims that AI will eliminate jobs, arguing the technology is already creating jobs—from chips and packaging to computer manufacturing. “It’s creating tons of jobs at the chips level for the first time.”

• “Every one of those manufacturing jobs creates six other jobs that support them,” Huang said.
• His takeaway: AI is creating jobs. “People who are experts in AI are highly sought after. AI is not going to take your job. Someone who is an expert in AI will compete for your job,” said Huang.
• Weeks compared AI to the rise of the internet, saying, “the [i]nternet was also a significant major changing type of event, but it wasn’t fundamentally about shifting physical infrastructure like AI is,” noting that both were transformational, “which makes people say any transformational technology goes through cycles[…]. I’ve never seen anything like what the world is building for AI infrastructure.”

Looking ahead: Weeks said Corning wants to work with “innovators who help,” adding, “[w]e are technical first [and] they’re great technologists at NVIDIA, and they help us see the future so we can help them make that future be real.”