By Anthony Di Pizio
Publication Date: 2026-04-14 13:00:00
Corning (GLW +2.29%) was founded in 1851, and it quickly became one of America’s leading innovators in the glassmaking industry. In fact, by 1880, the company was working with Thomas Edison to commercialize the lightbulb.
The modern Corning is best known as the glass supplier for Apple‘s iPhone, but the company is in the spotlight for a different reason right now. It developed a range of fiber-optic cables for data centers, which transmit information at a much faster rate than traditional copper cables, and demand is surging from the artificial intelligence (AI) industry, where transfer speeds are sacred.
Corning’s stock price has exploded higher by more than 321% over the last 12 months, making it one of the best performers in the entire semiconductor industry. It has crushed shares of Nvidia, Broadcom, and Advanced Micro Devices, which are up 70%, 107%, and 164%, respectively, over the same period. Can Corning keep up this incredible winning streak?
Image source: Getty Images.
Corning’s new fiber products are a game-changer
The AI industry’s most advanced models now use a concept called reasoning, which involves “thinking” in the background to weed out errors before responding to prompts. They process far more data per query than older models, so transfer speeds are more important than ever — if a model can’t produce timely responses, users will simply abandon it.
Optical fiber is proven to transmit information faster and over longer distances than copper, with…
