AI Is Making This Glass Maker One of the Year's Hottest Stocks

Key Takeaways

• Corning stock rose to a record high on Friday, pacing the S&P 500 with a 6% gain.
• Corning shares have soared in the past year amid surging demand for fiber optic cables in data centers.
• The stock achieved its first record high since 2000 earlier this year.

Shares of glass maker Corning (GLW) soared to a record high on Friday, as the supplier of a key component in data center networking equipment continued to ride a wave of AI enthusiasm.

Shares of Corning rose above $140 for the first time ever on Friday. The stock was recently up more than 6%, making it the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 in afternoon trading and bringing its year-to-date return to nearly 60%.

Why This Is Important

The data center boom has benefited a variety of businesses providing equipment and services that facilitate the training and deployment of artificial intelligence. Corning is just one of several surprise beneficiaries, including data storage device makers and electric utilities, of the hundreds of billions being spent on AI.

The glass maker’s stock has soared in the past year amid booming demand for its fiber-optic cables. The company last month announced a $6 billion deal with Meta to supply the social media giant with cables for its network of data centers. The glass in fiber optic cables allows data to be transmitted more quickly and efficiently than alternatives like copper, making it an essential component of the AI boom.

Meta (META) and the other hyperscalers—Alphabet (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), and Oracle (ORCL)—are expected to spend more than $600 billion on infrastructure this year, with much of it going toward equipment to fill AI-enabling data centers. That spending has been a boon to all kinds of companies designing and manufacturing that equipment, including chip companies, networking equipment makers, and power suppliers. Lately, memory chip and data storage device makers have been the biggest beneficiaries of booming demand and short supply.

Corning’s stock this year has finally overtaken its previous record high set back in 2000 when telecommunications companies spent huge sums to build out internet infrastructure. Then as now, fiber optic cables were in hot demand in the late 1990s. Corning stock rose to a record high of about $113 in September 2000. Then the Dotcom Bubble burst and a little over a year later shares had lost nearly all of their value, trading below $2 in 2002.

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