Corning has made glass since the 1850s. This week, that turned it into one of the AI boom's biggest winners.
Amazon agreed to pay the company billions for glass fiber. The fiber will feed its data centers.
Corning stock jumped as much as 8.4% on Monday, then closed up more than 5%.
Glass, Not Chips
When people pick AI winners, they think chips. But Corning makes the cables that move the data.
You might already own its glass. Corning makes the tough screens on many phones, including the iPhone.
Its glass even shows up in some cars.
Its fiber lines carry data as light, not electricity. That makes them faster and cooler than old copper wires.
AI data centers link thousands of chips. They move huge amounts of data between them.
Light-based fiber keeps up where copper falls behind. Copper also runs hotter, which costs more to cool.
Demand has been strong for months, and AI is the reason. Each new data center needs miles of cable.
The business is booming. Corning's fiber unit is its biggest.
Sales there grew 36% from a year earlier last quarter. Most of that growth came from AI buyers.
The Amazon deal also pays for more output. It adds about 1,000 jobs at Corning's plants in North Carolina.
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Three Giants In Six Months
Amazon isn't the first. It's the third tech giant to back Corning this year.
Meta signed on in January. It pledged up to $6 billion through 2030.
Nvidia followed in late April, with a supply deal and a $500 million stake.
CEO Wendell Weeks first hinted at two huge deals on an April earnings call. He said both were very large.
He still won't name those customers.
The Amazon deal runs for years, not months. Corning called Amazon just one of many deals in its pipeline.
These big buyers are called hyperscalers. They are the huge cloud firms that run the internet's largest data centers.
When they commit, Corning's sales tend to follow.
The stock has more than doubled this year. The S&P 500 is up only about 8%.
Worth Noting
These long deals matter beyond the big dollar signs. Corning has been burned before.
In the dotcom boom, it built fiber for demand that never showed up. Locking in giants like Amazon first means it isn't making that bet alone.
These deals also share the risk. Corning builds, and its customers commit to buy.
So both sides have skin in the game.
Corning has now named three giant deals in six months. That's a fast clip for one supplier.
The company lived through the last fiber bust. Now it's making sure it's on the right side of this one.
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