LIVE MARKETS-Corning's Second Fiber Boom
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CORNING'S SECOND FIBER BOOM
Wall Street has rediscovered an old flame. Corning Inc GLW.N, the 175-year-old glassmaker that became a dotcom darling — and then a cautionary tale — is once again one of the market's favorite plays for a great network buildout.
Shares jumped 6% on Monday after Amazon announced a multiyear, multibillion-dollar deal for Corning to supply optical fiber and connectivity solutions for its U.S. data centers.
The stock is up almost sixfold since the end of 2023, touching an all-time intraday high of $211.79 in May.
The déjà vu is dizzying. In the late 1990s, Corning rode the fiber-optic craze to stratospheric heights, authorizing a 3-for-1 stock split in August 2000 — right at the top of the bubble. Then the hangover arrived. Telecom companies had massively overbuilt and demand collapsed. The stock cratered to around $1 by 2002, from over $110 two years earlier.
Anyone brave enough to buy at the bottom and hold for two decades is now sitting on one of the great patient-money trades in market history.
This time the catalyst is AI rather than dial-up. Data centers require vast amounts of fiber to move data between servers and networking hardware, putting Corning back in fashion.
Whether this is a second golden age or Fiber Bubble 2.0 depends on whether today's tech giants prove better at matching capacity with actual demand than the telecom barons of 2000. For now, Wall Street is happy to pay a premium for glass tubes that move light very, very fast.
(Karen Brettell)
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