Amazon taps Corning to power US AI data centers; Corning shares jump 9%

Amazon's agreement with Corning to supply its US AI data centers sent Corning shares up 9% and was framed by Corning's CEO as a milestone for American manufacturing. The deal reflects the intense build-out of domestic AI infrastructure and the scramble to secure not just chips but the full supply chain — optical fiber, connectivity and components — needed to wire massive AI campuses.

The most striking detail is that Amazon's largest AI data center has come online powering Anthropic's workloads without Nvidia chips, presumably running on Amazon's in-house Trainium/Inferentia silicon. That validates Amazon's multibillion-dollar bet on custom accelerators and its deep Anthropic partnership — the same week Claude Fable 5 launched at GA on Bedrock.

Strategically, building Anthropic-scale workloads on non-Nvidia hardware is a hedge against NVIDIA's pricing power and supply constraints, and a proof point that frontier training and inference can run on alternative silicon. It dovetails with the week's broader infrastructure narrative — D-Matrix challenging NVIDIA on inference, NVIDIA locking up memory supply via SK hynix — all pointing to compute and energy as the binding constraints.

The caveats: the Corning deal's financial terms weren't fully disclosed, and 'without Nvidia chips' claims warrant scrutiny on performance-per-dollar versus Nvidia-based clusters. Readers should watch whether Amazon expands non-Nvidia capacity and how Anthropic's training economics compare on Trainium.