AT&T has signed a $3 billion-plus fiber supply deal with Corning, adding to a string of major commitments as AI data-center construction tightens optical supply and telcos bulk up their networks.
In sum – what to know:
Supply guarantees – AT&T’s $3bn Corning deal supports a target to reach 60 million Americans with fiber by 2030, while household data consumption continues to rise.
Corning cornerstone – Verizon, Zayo, Lumen, Meta, and Nvidia have all made big commitments around Corning’s fiber and optical manufacturing capacity as AI demand builds.
Optical stack – Fiber demand is feeding into optical networking equipment and components, with Ciena, Nokia, Cisco, and plenty of others positioning for the AI build-out.
Telcos are queuing up at the doors of US fiber optic cable and glass manufacturer Corning. AT&T is the latest to exit through them with a big multi-year deal to shore up its fiber supplies as the AI infrastructure build-out puts pressure on an already-stretched optical supply chain. The firm says its agreement with Corning is worth more than $3 billion. It also said, as if to remind the world, that fiber is the “gold standard”, and “three-times faster than satellite services”, with capacity to handle everything from everyday work and video streaming to new-fangled AI services coming down the line (“with room for whatever comes next”). The deal looks as much like a telco insurance policy.
It added: “AT&T’s [delete PR superlative] combination of fiber and wireless makes connectivity simple for customers at home, at work, and on the go. Satellite will complement those networks by helping extend connectivity in roughly two percent of remote areas.” Which is kind of curious, given its claim about the near-total superiority of its solution set, that a statement about an otherwise-unrelated technology is right at the top of a press release; but such is the stir that Musk/Starlink has caused in the market, about carrying the “majority of the world’s internet within 10 years”. So telcos are defensive in their messaging, even as they are aggressive in the market.
AT&T said its new deal with Corning will give it a ready supply of fiber and cable to expand its network, nominally to households (versus data centers, which are presented as a secondary strategy for the firm). It said it supports the US economy by building on “investments in critical connectivity infrastructure and its fully unionized frontline workforce”, plus by commissioning Corning’s US manufacturing and “American-made products”. AT&T has a target – presented as a “deal to connect America” – to offer “reliable internet” to 60 million people in the US by the end of 2030. It said its household customers now use over one terabyte of data per month, on average.
This is five-times more than a decade ago (in 2016). AT&T expects average monthly household usage to reach 2-2.5 terabytes by 2030. It does not say what proportion of new demand it expects to come directly from ‘AI’ related services. Per its satellite comments, AT&T is effectively describing a tech hierarchy for connectivity, with fiber at the top for foundational high-capacity systems, wireless 5G/6G for mobility and FWA, and satellite around the edges. John Stankey, chairman and chief executive at AT&T, commented: “Fiber remains the gold standard for superior internet connectivity… [Its] speed, reliability, and capacity remain unmatched for any home or business.”
It might be noted, AT&T’s stated strategy runs a little contrary, in tone at least, to some of the ‘supercycle’ suckery of others – including Verizon, Lumen, Nokia, Ciena – insofar as AT&T will take data-center interconnect (DCI) business where it makes sense, but its work, more prosaically, is just to build better networks to put AI to work for consumers and enterprises. Which is a simple message, and also a quite-powerful one. Its bundled fiber-and-5G convergence play for households is already paying out, but it goes further into multi-access comms as well – including with satellite (via AST SpaceMobile, and not Starlink – of course), as required.
The firm has committed around $250 billion over five years to strengthen its US connectivity infrastructure. Corning is investing heavily in its US fiber and cable manufacturing base, notably at its facilities in North Carolina. Wendell Weeks, chairman, chief executive, and president at Corning, added: “By pairing our large, US-based advanced manufacturing with AT&T’s network leadership, we can keep co-innovating to build the dense fiber networks that will drive the future of connectivity – while sustaining thousands of highly skilled American jobs and strengthening domestic supply chains.” Corning has formidable form, lately; the deal with AT&T is the latest in a long line.
Verizon to Nvidia
Very similar: Verizon has just signed a mega deal (size undisclosed) with it for 80 million miles (130 million kilometers) of high-density optical fiber and “connectivity solutions” in the US, 2027 through 2032, as it looks to build a “converged architecture” to “unite mobile and broadband”, and serve everyone (consumers, families, businesses), and meanwhile construct a fiber backbone for AI hyperscalers. “We are securing the physical foundation of America’s AI economy,” said Kyle Malady, chief executive at Verizon Business. Verizon has a stated target to reach 40-50 million broadband FTTH ‘passings’ for homes and offices, plus for carrier cell towers and enterprise data centers. “This multi-use fiber foundation serves as the physical engine for the AI era,” the firm said earlier this month.
Also this month: fiber-specialist service provider Zayo announced an expanded deal with Corning for a “significant portion” of the fiber-optic cable it expects to need through the end of the decade. Zayo plans to add 15,000 new route miles by 2030, mostly between data center facilities, including more than 8,000 miles of new long-haul fiber in collaboration with Nvidia, while also adding capacity to busy existing AI corridors. “It’s becoming a more meaningful constraint,” Troy Lupe, chief network officer at Zayo, told RCR Wireless, in reference to the fiber constraint on AI infrastructure deployments. “That pressure [will] build over the next two years,” he said.
The most formative deal of this kind, arguably, is by Zayo-rival Lumen, which signed with Corning in 2024 to reserve 10% of Corning’s global fiber capacity for two years – through to the end of 2026, nominally. Lumen said at the time that the deployment would more than double its US intercity fiber miles, explicitly geared to connect AI data centers. Lumen, it might be suggested, is capitalizing on its fiber build-out now, as the AI wave rises still – thanks to deals made a couple of years ahead of its peak. (Lumen appears to be benefiting as well from its own internal reorganization and strategy shift, well discussed in these pages.)
Meanwhile, Corning has new mega-deals with hyperscalers too, of course: a multi-year $6 billion contract with Meta, signed in January, for fiber-optic cables for its data centers (and a reciprocal bump for Corning’s manufacturing capacity in North Carolina, including a 15-20 percent increase in jobs); and a long-term partnership with Nvidia, the king of AI chips, signed in May, to supply optical connectivity for its accelerated hyperscale AI infrastructure. The Nvidia deal, the biggest of them all, has prompted Corning to increase US optical manufacturing capacity by 10-times (1,000 percent), fiber capacity by more than 50 percent, and build three new factories and hire 3,000 staff to get the work done.
Ciena to Cisco
The whole story can be chased up the stack, invariably from Nvidia, and via Corning – from the glass and cable into the optical networking kit that makes it all useful; before you get to the component (Lumentum and Coherent are busy; Nvidia invested $2 billion in each earlier this year), and way before the telco build-out on top. Ciena, say, has a similar cluster of deals: Lumen selected its WaveLogic 6 Extreme solution for a network expansion to serve cloud and AI traffic in February 2025; a trio of unnamed hyperscalers, cited in Ciena’s Q1 results, picked its optical tech for distributed AI training, with all three ramping orders; Vodafone Idea has deployed WaveLogic 6 Extreme on 400G and 800G services across its DCI network for hyperscale and cloud traffic, claiming up to 1.6Tbps per channel.
Ciena says hyperscalers and service providers are increasingly working together on bespoke DCI networks, with the former specifying the design and the latter delivering it as a managed (MOFN) service; MOFN demand drove a 40 percent jump in Q1 orders in India. In August, Ciena surveyed service providers and found 96 percent expect managed optical fiber services to generate revenue from connecting distributed AI compute clusters within three years, while 51 percent identified MOFN as their primary DCI vehicle. (Ciena is on a panel session with Zayo at SCTE TechExpo this week called ‘Monetizing Fiber for the AI Data Center Boom’.)
Meanwhile, Nokia’s acquisition of Infinera has given it a broader optical portfolio, and a means to pitch ICE coherent optics, IP-over-DWDM, and DCI solutions directly into the AI buildout. Telxius is deploying Nokia’s 800G coherent pluggables variously across its terrestrial networks in Europe, the US, and Latin America – specifically for cloud and AI infrastructure growth. The Finnish firm has a useful-looking deployment with t3 Broadband and Aureon, also: an optical network to connect a North Dakota data-center development to Chicago at 100Tbps, rising to 400Tbps. Cisco, via Acacia, is chasing the optical market, too, and says all the major hyperscalers are now buying its coherent pluggables, while its latest optical line-system work is aimed at high-fiber AI infrastructure.
Analyst house Dell’Oro puts Ciena, Nokia, and Cisco at roughly 90 percent of optical transport systems sold to cloud providers.
