Nvidia and Corning select North Carolina for future manufacturing site, hiring
Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, has announced plans to support at least one new manufacturing plant in North Carolina through a partnership with the materials science company Corning.
Under a multiyear deal announced Wednesday, Corning will substantially increase its domestic production of fiber and optical connectivity infrastructure to serve hyperscale AI data centers, which are powered by Nvidia’s graphic processing units, or GPUs.
Corning will scale its output by building three new factories across North Carolina and Texas, the two companies shared in a joint news release. Nvidia and Corning said the project will create more than 3,000 jobs. The agreement gives Nvidia the ability to invest up to $3.2 billion in Corning.
The companies did not share location specifics for these factories, nor whether one or two would be in the Tar Heel State. Both business already have footprints in the state.
Corning Optical, a division of New York-based Corning Inc., is headquartered in Charlotte. Corning has fiber production sites in Wilmington and Concord, and cable manufacturing plants in Winston-Salem, Newton and Hickory. In January, Corning announced a $6 billion partnership with Meta to grow the Hickory site, an hour north of Charlotte.
Few companies have benefited more from the ongoing artificial intelligence boom than Nvidia. It’s share price has soared in the past three years, and today, the California chipmaker is worth more than $5 trillion.
“AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout of our time — and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvigorate American manufacturing and supply chains,” Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang was quoted as saying in Wednesday’s joint statement.
In January 1999, Nvidia opened a small office near Research Triangle Park as its first corporate site outside the California Bay Area. By 2000, the company had 24 employees in the Triangle, and Nvidia later relocated to a larger building on Meridian Parkway. Around 300 people worked at that location as of May 2023, an Nvidia spokesperson told The News & Observer at the time.
Today, Durham is one of 18 U.S. cities the company lists as having a corporate office.
This story was originally published May 6, 2026 at 4:02 PM with the headline "Nvidia and Corning select North Carolina for future manufacturing site, hiring."
