Amazon struck a multibillion-dollar deal with fiber producer Corning to supply optical fiber, cable, and other connectivity platforms for Amazon’s widening data center infrastructure across the US, a deal that includes 1,000 new jobs and continues Corning’s surge in data center connectivity deals.

Fiber
– Thinkstock/kynny

The agreement is termed as a multi-year deal to provide connectivity to Amazon data centers and bolster the cloud giant’s domestic supply chain. This is in line with recent comments by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who recently told investors that the cloud giant remains capacity-constrained but that it's working closely with its strategic partners and "saw this trend happening early, in the middle to latter part of last year, and we have worked with our strategic suppliers to get a significant amount of supply.

“We are working very closely with them,” Jassy added. “I think the team has been very scrappy. I think we have done a good job in making sure that we are not capacity constrained there, but we will watch that very closely."

The two firms also highlighted the 1,000 new jobs that will be created at Corning’s North Carolina facilities, hundreds of jobs tied to site expansion, and a workforce training program. That training program expands Corning’s Fiber Optic Technician Training work with Catawba Valley Community College.

The agreement aligns with Corning’s recent deals with other large players in the data center space, most notably a “multiyear commercial and technology partnership” with Nvidia. Reports indicate that deal is set to earmark up to $500 million to expand Corning’s manufacturing capabilities by up to tenfold, boost its fiber production capacity by more than 50 percent, and includes plans for three new manufacturing facilities in North Carolina and Texas that will result in more than 3,000 new jobs.

Lumen Technologies had previously struck a deal with Corning in mid-2024 that reserved 10 percent of Corning’s global fiber production capacity, a deal that at that time was Lumen’s largest-ever fiber purchase.

Last month, chip giant Nvidia announced a multi-year investment in Corning of up to $3.2 billion that will ramp up the production of fiber optic cables in the US.