The AI boom runs on chips and electricity. It also runs on glass.
Amazon is paying Corning billions of dollars for optical fibre to wire up its rapidly expanding US data centres, the two companies said on Monday. The multi-year agreement will create about 1,000 jobs at Corning’s North Carolina factories, though neither side disclosed its total value or length.
Corning’s shares jumped 9 per cent on the news; Amazon’s rose about 1 per cent.
Fibre-optic cable has become an unglamorous but essential layer of AI infrastructure. Training and running large models means shifting enormous volumes of data at high speed between data centres and the racks and chips inside them, and that traffic travels over glass.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!As compute demand explodes, so does the need for the cable that connects it all.
