The little-known business behind the light bulb and the iPhone

You know Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs — but have you heard of Wendell Weeks?

Probably not. He’s the CEO of Corning Inc., the 173-year-old New York glass company that has long supplied the glass for some of the world’s most famous inventions, per Fortune. 

• Corning Glass Works filled a $311.97 order on Nov. 17, 1880, for a customer named Thomas Edison who was looking to tinker with a new invention: the lightbulb. 
• In 2007, another big name in tech contacted Corning: Steve Jobs cold-called Weeks looking for glass that wouldn’t break or scratch easily for a new phone concept called the iPhone. 
• Within six months, Corning created Gorilla Glass. It has since generated $20B+ in revenue and is used on 8B+ devices (and recently faced antitrust actions for its dominance).
• Corning created kitchen brand Pyrex, the glass used in telescopes, the glass tubes that powered the earliest TVs, and heat-resistant spacecraft windows.

And in the 1990s, the company invented optical fiber to power the internet, which drove Corning’s valuation to just shy of $100B in 2000. When the internet bubble burst, the company’s stock price crashed from $100 to $1.

But the company recovered, and has since reached a market cap of $41B, generating $13B in revenue in 2023 and seeing a ~50% stock price increase since January. 

AI is the clear bet 

What’s making the company’s stock surge 173 years after its founding? You guessed it: AI. 

• Corning is once again building optical cables, this time for the AI generation. It sealed a multimillion-dollar deal with Lumen Technologies to reserve 10% of its global fiber capacity to power data centers for the next two years. 
• The company’s optical fiber business now accounts for 30% of its revenue, and companies like Microsoft are turning to Corning for denser fibers that can keep up with the demands of generative AI.

While optical fibers are important — we do, obviously, like the internet — the 50k+ objects in the Corning Museum of Glass are even more fun to look at.