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Fiber for AI circles Earth
Corning's fiber
Corning has a very high share of the fiber for these buildings. Its fiber is thinner and more bendable and can be specially manufactured to exact specs. It carries higher margins and is the fastest-growing part of Corning's business.
Scale out and across
Networking in an AI cluster has levels. Scale out connects all the server racks together. Scale across connects the data centers together, which is how a huge training cluster gets built when you can't get all the power in one place. Those links need about 10x the wire, and the wire has to be much thicker, which creates huge growth.
Scale up
Scale up connects every GPU in a rack to the others, and today that is done over copper. If it eventually moves to fiber, it two-to-three-X's Corning's opportunity.
How does light travel through fiber?
An optical fiber has a glass core wrapped in a glass cladding with a slightly lower refractive index. Light that hits the boundary at a shallow angle reflects back inward, an effect called total internal reflection. The light bounces along the core for miles. A standard single-mode fiber has a core about 9 micrometers wide inside a 125-micrometer cladding.
How did Corning make low-loss fiber?
In 1970, Corning researchers Robert Maurer, Donald Keck, and Peter Schultz produced glass fiber that lost less than 20 decibels of signal per kilometer. That was the threshold engineers had set for practical communications. Today's fiber loses only about 0.2 decibels per kilometer. A signal can therefore travel tens of kilometers before it needs a boost.
Why build AI clusters across several sites?
A single large AI campus can need hundreds of megawatts, and connecting that much power to the grid can take years. When one site cannot supply enough, builders spread a cluster across several sites. Training splits the work so the sites can trade data over fiber. Light moves through glass at about 5 microseconds per kilometer.
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