Jensen Huang has been warning for months that copper has hit a wall inside AI factories, and on Wednesday his Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) put $500 million behind the fix with a deal to back glass maker Corning Inc. (NYSE:GLW).

Corning shares jumped roughly 12% on the news. The package may grow to $3.2 billion if Nvidia exercises all the warrants attached to the deal.

The cash funds three new manufacturing plants in North Carolina and Texas. Corning said the build-out will expand U.S. fiber production by more than 50% and grow optical connectivity capacity tenfold, creating roughly 3,000 jobs.

Copper Has Hit Its Limit

Modern AI factories wire thousands of GPUs together so they behave like one giant chip, and the cabling between them has become the bottleneck.

Copper signals fall apart past about a meter at AI-cluster speeds, forcing power-hungry amplification that already eats close to 30% of total cluster electricity, according to Nvidia executives.

However, glass fiber moves data much faster, uses less power, and the strands are thinner than a hair. Nvidia’s newest switches, called Spectrum-X, turn electricity into light right on the chip, which Huang says cuts power use by up to 40%.

The Corning deal extends a pattern: Nvidia poured roughly $4 billion into Coherent and Lumentum earlier this year and took a stake in Marvell Technology, locking in the vendors it depends on.

“AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout of our time,” Huang said in a statement.

Polymarket Still Sees Nvidia As The Trillion-Dollar Anchor

Polymarket’s largest company by year-end market prices Nvidia at 58% to finish 2026 as the world’s most valuable company, well clear of Alphabet at 30% and Apple at 7%.

The contract has drawn $2.6 million in volume.

Not every market is taking the buildout at face value. Polymarket’s bubble burst contract gives a 24% chance the industry hits a downturn by Dec. 31, 2026, defined in part as Nvidia stock falling 50% from its all-time high. Volume sits at $2.8 million.

Corning’s optical communications segment booked $1.85 billion in Q1 sales, up 36% year over year. The company also signed two more hyperscaler supply agreements similar in scale to its multiyear, up-to-$6 billion deal with Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META), according to CEO Wendell Weeks.

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