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Corning has ambitious plans to expand its manufacturing of fiber optics and other solutions for AI infrastructure, capitalizing on the data-center boom, the company’s CFO tells CFO Journal’s Mark Maurer. He writes for today’s newsletter:
Nvidia earlier this month agreed to invest $500 million in Corning, allowing the specialty materials company to boost its U.S.-based optical connectivity manufacturing capacity by 10 times and to expand its U.S. fiber production capacity by more than 50%. Nvidia has the option to purchase up to 15 million Corning shares. Shares have soared over the past year on rising AI demand.
Corning expects to benefit from data centers’ shift from copper wiring to optical cables, because optical transceivers will be needed directly “inside the compute box” to connect GPUs to one another, Chief Financial Officer Ed Schlesinger said.
“That's an entire new set of products. So I feel pretty confident that growth for us and that content continues to grow certainly well past 2030,” said Schlesinger, who foresees an impact on hiring.
The company plans to create about 3,000 jobs through the development of three new advanced manufacturing facilities in North Carolina and Texas. Like many companies, Corning is evaluating hiring needs as AI automates certain types of work and boosts efficiencies.
Key quote: “On the job front, on the manufacturing floor, you definitely need people to make stuff,” Schlesinger said. “We may hire less people than we might have otherwise hired, but we're certainly going to have plenty of job opportunities as we continue to add capacity,” he said, referring to meeting demand from companies such as Apple, Meta and Nvidia.
The company is focused on building an AI-enabled workforce, as opposed to cutting, he said. “Our primary objective is how do we find the way to implement AI and make our employees better, versus having a really large reduction in force like you're seeing in a lot of other places,” he said.
Schlesinger on his own AI use: “I would not consider myself an AI expert in any way, but I like experimenting and learning.” He said he turns to Corning’s chief digital and information officer, Soumya Seetharam, and her team, among others, for help with using certain AI tools.
“There are even the simple things of how to write a better prompt so you actually get what you need on the first try, versus the 10th try,” he said. “I have a number of people on the finance team that I might shoot a text to saying, 'I'm struggling to try to get this. What would you do?' Generally it improves immensely.”
—Mark Maurer
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