By Christopher Mims

Corning, the 175-year-old American company that made the glass screen on your phone as well as the fiber optics delivering the internet to it, is on a tear.

Its stock has roughly doubled since Jan. 1. It's on pace to deliver on its plan to increase sales 50% by 2028. It recently signed multibillion-dollar deals with Nvidia and Meta to provide fiber for data centers and has just announced yet another, this time with Amazon.

So why is the company's chief executive, Wendell Weeks, insisting on provisions in those deals to protect Corning in the event the world's most valuable tech companies don't actually need all the fiber they think they will? And how can he demand such terms?

The answers to these questions can be found in Corning's long history of research and development and talent retention, not to mention the fact that Weeks, CEO since 2005, headed the fiber-optics division during the dot-com boom and bust.

Corning's deal terms -- which sometimes include upfront money from customers to build out manufacturing capacity required to deliver their orders -- are all about apportioning risk to its rightful owner, Weeks told me in a wide-ranging interview conducted the day after the Amazon deal was announced.

This kind of hedge is historically unusual for vendors to giant companies, says Frank Louthan, a managing director of Raymond James who covers the fiber and telecom industries. "Most large companies have a view of their vendors that can be summarized as, 'I'm going to allow you to do business with me, so that I can make money off of you.'"

"When we sit down with our customers, there's certain risks that really belong with their shareholders, and there's certain risks that belong with mine," Weeks says. Corning, he continues, should be responsible for R&D, innovation and the development of new products. But when it comes to producing those products for customers at a gigantic scale, it's those customers who must own the uncertainty that comes with building out massive data centers at unprecedented speed, he says.

"They should have the risk of saying, 'I needed a million of this,'" says Weeks. "Because if they said they needed a million and, you know, they need 100 -- well that's a problem."

While it's not uncommon to hear talk of a potential AI investment bubble in the world of finance, it's more unusual to hear it from the chief of a company that manufactures the physical stuff essential to the AI boom.

Weeks doesn't think the demand any of these tech giants have for his products will falter anytime soon. But he knows that as long as they need Corning's optical fiber and silicon photonics, he shouldn't be the one betting the family farm on their ambitions.

Fiber fanatics

Corning's fiber has proven essential for connecting the thousands -- and sometimes hundreds of thousands -- of specialized AI chips inside the world's biggest AI data centers.

"Remember, when you're building a neural network, every GPU needs to have a path to every other GPU in the cluster," Weeks says. "What creates those paths once you leave the server rack is light."

As a result of the dense mesh of fiber that AI data centers require, this year Corning anticipates its data-center business will eclipse its sales to telecommunications companies.

Meta and Nvidia declined to comment on their deals with Corning. An Amazon spokesman said the details of their agreement are confidential.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said previously that in addition to investing in Corning, his company is prepaying billions of dollars to make it possible for Corning to build out the capacity to deliver. Huang has said in the past that his company invests in key suppliers to guarantee that Nvidia has the components it needs, and to expand that supply in the future.

There are two major differences between Corning and the kinds of vendors to big tech companies which in the past have been on the hook for stranded assets after those companies walked away.

The first is that Corning produces high-performance, hollow-core optical-glass fiber -- a product that required decades of R&D to perfect. This gives the company a technological moat, more like a microchip maker or enterprise software company, Louthan says.

That allows for leverage in negotiations, he adds: Corning can demand, up front, that its customers provide it with the capital to expand factories and hire more workers.

Mr. Seen-It-All-Before

The second thing that distinguishes Corning is its leadership: One of the longest-serving executives in corporate America, Weeks has seen this movie before. In 2000 and 2001, he had a front-row seat.

During the dot-com boom, Corning's market valuation resembled that of a modern-day meme stock. It skyrocketed on the logic that the build-out of the internet would require as much of the company's fiber as possible. The stock crashed when everything else did. Yet Corning's fiber actually was deployed steadily over the following decades, as the internet became a public utility.

"What we want to do is always be able to protect our people and our shareholders and our assets, because we sign up for the long term," Weeks says. "175-year-olds, they're hard to talk into a fly-by-night thing."

Corning has seen other periods of flagging revenue since then, most recently during the pandemic. Weeks had to fend off calls by shareholders to lay off employees, or reduce investment in R&D and factories.

Corning hasn't outsourced talent and production like so many other once-great American companies. Weeks says this is why the company is now in position to be the leading domestic supplier of fiber optics for the AI age.

"We stay dedicated to always investing probably around twice as much in [research, development and engineering] as any of our peers, and we remain dedicated to manufacturing ourselves," he adds.

During boom times, "those values look like they're brilliant," he continues. "And at times when it's inconvenient, well, you know, then we still are who we are."

It's unclear when markets might turn and investors could once again find the way Corning operates "inconvenient." Last week, Corning and other AI-linked stocks were clobbered by fears that the debt-fueled AI build-out might slow, and this week the selloff of tech stocks has continued.

Compared with companies and leaders with more of a history of mergers, acquisitions and financial engineering, Weeks and the company he has led for over two decades might look stubborn, or at least old-fashioned. But, as it happens, that's what it takes for the company that provided Edison with his glass lightbulbs to once again play a key role in a history-transforming technology.

Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 12, 2026 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.