When you have a dominant position in an industry, you should think not only about the competitiveness of your product, but also about eliminating bottlenecks in the sector to ensure smooth deployment of your hardware. This is exactly what Nvidia is doing by investing $300 million in Corning, enabling it to build three additional manufacturing facilities in the U.S. to produce optical fiber used to build AI data centers. As an added bonus, Nvidia will assume control of a significant part of American fiber production.

The long-term agreement will see the construction of three new facilities in North Carolina and Texas to produce optical fiber, which will be supplied to builders of hyperscale data centers that deploy Nvidia AI hardware. As a result, Corning will increase its U.S. optical connectivity manufacturing output by a factor of 10 and expand domestic fiber production capacity by over 50%. The plants are expected to employ 3,000 people.

Modern AI workloads require hundreds of thousands of AI accelerators working in concert and moving data at unprecedented scale. The only way to meet bandwidth and latency requirements for such deployments is to use optical fiber and photonics hardware for connectivity. As a result, the role of optical networking for AI data centers is hard to overestimate, and the skyrocketing demand for optical fiber at scale is easy to predict.

Corning is known for its expertise in glass science and optical physics and as the world's largest maker of optical cables with a 10.4% market share. With those credentials, the company is a good partner to fulfill that demand, so Nvidia's decision to team up with it is not surprising. Meanwhile, the press release by the two companies clearly states that the new plants will supply the optical connectivity hyperscale data centers use to deploy Nvidia-accelerated computing at scale,' so instead of helping the whole industry to get optical fiber, the company only helps the part of the industry that relies on its own hardware.

"AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout of our time — and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvigorate American manufacturing and supply chains," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. "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."

By investing in Corning, Nvidia not only ensures its partners will have enough optical fiber, but also gains control over a significant chunk of U.S. optical fiber production capacity, which is a good way to ensure the company's dominance in the American AI sector going forward.

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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.