- The OFC conference is now more focused on AI than it is on telecom
- A Corning executive said it used to display its frontend products at the OFC show, but it now displays a lot more backend products for AI
- Hollow-core fiber is also a big topic at OFC
LOS ANGELES — The big optical show — the 2026 Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) — this week is all about AI. As one analyst at an OFC media panel phrased it, “This has changed from a telecom show to an AI show.”
And the operative word at this AI show is “more.” How to cram more dense fiber optics into smaller form factors with more throughput.
At the Corning booth, folks were showing off their latest products to provide more fiber optic capacity, both outside and inside the data center.
Corning showed traditional ribbon cable where fibers are encased in plastic tubes, contrasted with its newer micro cable, which dispenses with the plastic tubes to save space.
Brian Rhoney, data center market development manager for Corning, said, “Round circles don’t stack well. If you think about the long-haul market, the duct space isn’t there.”
It’s important to pack more fibers into as much space as possible.
Corning was also touting its multi-core fiber technology, where instead of one optical core, it integrates four cores into a single strand, enabling a step change in bandwidth.
For its work inside the data center, Corning is displaying stacks of servers where it’s now packing in more fibers to connect those servers to racks of switches.
The reason for all the demand for more density is, of course, AI. And Rhoney said, “This year, it seems like everything has an AI story.”
Fierce asked what this show was like three years ago, compared to today.
Rhoney said that from Corning’s perspective the show traditionally provided an opportunity to display its latest products related to the frontend network – or the network that connects data centers to each other and to the long-haul internet. But because of AI, there’s a big new focus on the backend network – which is inside the data center, connecting machines to other machines.
Hollow-core fiber
Fierce also asked about the growing demand for hollow-core fiber optics, where light travels through an empty glass core, rather than through solid glass.
Rhoney explained that hollow-core fiber improves latency. “In the past you could only interconnect data centers from a certain distance,” he said. “Now you can connect data centers that are farther apart.”
He admitted that hollow-core fiber has been around for quite a while, but it’s been continuously refined over the years. “It’s now usable. There’s a lot of activity in the market around hollow core.”
In fact, Corning has a collaboration with Microsoft, which it announced in September 2025, in which Corning is providing the manufacturing of hollow-core fiber for the Seattle-based hyperscaler.
Microsoft struck agreements with Corning and also with Heraeus Covantics to ramp its global hollow-core fiber deployments. It aims to create a “multinational production supply chain to scale next generation fiber production,” Microsoft said in a blog.
Corning has also recently announced new AI deals with other big companies including Meta and Lumen Technologies.