Amazon has signed a multi-billion dollar, multi-year deal with Corning to supply optical fibre for its expanding US AI data centres, creating around 1,000 jobs in North Carolina. The agreement is Corning's third major AI megadeal of 2026, following deals worth up to $6bn from Meta and $3.2bn from Nvidia. Corning's stock has more than doubled this year and is up nearly sixfold since end of 2023. The deal highlights how AI infrastructure bottlenecks are shifting beyond chips and power to physical networking components like fibre-optic cable. Amazon is spending roughly $200bn this year on AI infrastructure, including $10bn pledged for North Carolina data centres and up to $25bn committed to Anthropic.
