Corning Inc – LSD News

Corning shares jump 4% after company strikes deal to power Amazon AI data centers in U.S.

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:00:16 +0000

Corning CEO Wendell Weeks at Corning’s cable factory in Hickory, North Carolina, on Jan. 9, 2026.

Magdalena Petrova | CNBC

Amazon is paying Corning billions of dollars for optical fiber to power and connect its rapidly expanding U.S. data centers, the latest megadeal featuring two companies at the center of the artificial intelligence boom.

The agreement, announced Monday, will play out over several years and create 1,000 jobs at Corning’s North Carolina factories, the companies said. Corning’s fiber optic cable and networking solutions are becoming essential elements of AI infrastructure because they enable fast connections between data centers and the racks and chips they house.

Shares of Corning popped 4% on Monday. Amazon stock was little changed.

“Amazon’s data centers power the services millions of people and businesses rely on every day,” the companies said in a press release. “Corning’s fiber optics are a critical piece of that infrastructure, and together, these investments help fuel the U.S. economic engine.”

The deal also expands a Corning training program for fiber optic technicians in North Carolina. Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said in the press release that the company’s investments in the state have created over 26,000 jobs. Last year, Amazon committed to spend $10 billion on new data centers in North Carolina.

Fresh demand from AI is reinvigorating the 175-year-old Corning as hyperscalers and AI labs scramble to meet their exploding needs for computing power. Corning’s shares have more than doubled so far this year and are up almost sixfold since the end of 2023.

In May, Nvidia committed to investing up to $3.2 billion in Corning as part of a deal that involves the glass company building three new advanced manufacturing plants entirely devoted to the chipmaker. And in January, Meta said it would spend up to $6 billion as the flagship customer helping Corning build out its optical cable plant in Hickory, North Carolina, an expansion that’s expected to create around 1,000 jobs.

Corning is well known for making all the display glass for Apple‘s iPhone, but optical communications remains its largest and fastest-growing business. Since inventing optical fiber for long-range communication in 1970, Corning has provided millions of miles of cables to connect racks together in AI data centers from all the major players.

The Trump administration has called on Big Tech to onshore as many steps in the AI supply chain as possible, and Corning helps answer that need. The majority of Corning’s business happens overseas, which CEO Wendell Weeks told CNBC earlier this year isn’t changing. But he also said “next year the hyperscalers will be our biggest customers.”

“This agreement with Amazon represents a significant milestone for Corning and for American manufacturing,” Weeks said in Monday’s press release, adding it will “lead the way toward building a resilient U.S. manufacturing base.”

WATCH: Amazon’s biggest AI data center powers Anthropic without Nvidia

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Nvidia is investing billions into this emerging technology that could change the AI industry

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:50:50 +0000

Nvidia has committed at least $6.5 billion into companies developing photonics technology in the past three months, as the company races to invest in solving one of the major bottlenecks to the rollout of AI.

Photonics, the use of light to transmit data, is an emerging technology considered to be a more efficient alternative to the current process of transferring data using electricity. Electrical data transfer consumes more energy — a factor which is increasingly seen as a blocker to the broader deployment of AI.

Since the beginning of March, Nvidia has announced $2 billion investments into Lumentum, Coherent and Marvell, all of which are developing photonics tech. The chip giant also said it would invest $500 million into Corning to develop advanced optical connectivity solutions, and participated in optics startup Ayer Labs’ $500 million Series E funding round.

“Photonics represents a way for Nvidia to scale their AI infrastructure without the energy costs that staying with electrical and copper will incur,” Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst at Forrester, told CNBC.

“By investing in photonics companies, Nvidia is making sure that advancements in photonics continue and it will prevent them from hitting a scalability and performance wall that will occur if they remain on electrical and copper.”

Solving bottlenecks

Photonics can be used in AI infrastructure by using light to move data between graphics processing units (GPUs), memory, networking chips, servers and data centers, instead of relying only on electrical signals running along copper.

While copper is the main connectivity standard today because of its lower cost and high reliability, photonics will become more prominent in AI infrastructure over time, Brian Colello, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNBC.

“Nvidia’s roadmap of next generation AI rack-scale solutions will require an increasing amount of optical connectivity to process the exponentially rising bandwidth with new models and higher usage,” he said.

The chip giant has already made some photonics tech available as part of its networking solutions offering, with the company announcing tools that it said will enable AI factories to connect millions of GPUs across sites while drastically reducing energy consumption and operational costs.

“When you look upstream, you come to the conclusion that we’re starting to scale our silicon photonics technology,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the GTC in March, pointing to Nvidia’s ethernet networking platform used to connect AI factories and GPU clusters. He also said the company was starting to add photonics to its GPU-to-GPU interconnect technology.

“Which means the amount of silicon photonics technology capacity that we need is substantially higher than the world has today,” he added. “So we work with the supply chain to make sure we can help them build up the capacity in advance of that.”

Lumentum’s stock has risen 134% since the start of the year, while Coherent is up 96%. Marvell has seen its shares increase by 122% in 2026 and Corning 111%.

Shares of companies involved in photonics have soared in the past year.

Nvidia is one of the many AI stakeholders recently making the move to funnel cash into photonics tech.

Chipmaker AMD joined Nvidia in the Ayer Labs round, as well as acquiring startup Enosemi in 2025, alongside making equity investments in Teramount and Celestial AI. Alphabet and Microsoft venture arms backed nEye in an $80 million Series C in April.

But deploying photonics tech across the AI infrastructure stack at scale comes with its own challenges.

“The technology is sound, production scale is the harder problem,” Nick Patience, AI lead at the Futurum Group, told CNBC.

“Manufacturing yield on complex co-packaged optical assemblies remains a challenge because precise alignment of optical and silicon components is unforgiving, and when something goes wrong in the packaging process, the assembly typically can’t be reworked,” he said.

“So the transition is underway, but it’s still early,” Patience added. “I would expect us to see large-scale adoption from 2028 onwards.”

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Here’s our monthly update on all 33 portfolio stocks, including 4 to buy right now

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:44:00 +0000

Wall Street sees ‘changing of the guard in AI’ as Intel, AMD shares soar while Nvidia lags

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Sun, 10 May 2026 05:25:45 +0000

Lisa Su, CEO of AMD speaks with CNBC on May 6, 2026.

CNBC

Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the start of the generative AI craze, one name has dominated the infrastructure boom: Nvidia.

While the chipmaker — and the world’s most valuable company — continues to prosper and is expected to show revenue growth of 70% this fiscal year, Wall Street has moved elsewhere, piling into businesses that were hardly visible in the initial years of the artificial intelligence buildout.

This week offered the starkest illustration yet of what MIzuho analyst Jordan Klein said could be a “changing of the guard in AI.” Chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel notched gains of about 25%, while memory maker Micron jumped more than 37% and fiber-optic cable maker Corning climbed about 18%.

All four of those companies have more than doubled in value this year, with Intel leading the way, up well over 200%. Nvidia, meanwhile, is only slightly ahead of the Nasdaq in 2026, gaining 15% for the year, aided by an 8% rally this week.

In spreading the wealth to a wider swath of hardware companies, investors are clearly betting that the bull market in AI has long legs and that data centers are going to need a wider array of advanced components for years to come. Memory has been the biggest theme of late due to a global shortage that’s driven up prices and turned Micron, a 47-year-old company tucked in a sleepy corner of the semiconductor market, into one of the hottest trades over the past 12 months.

Micron blew past an $800 billion market capitalization for the first time this week, and the stock is now up over 750% in the past year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in March that key customers are only getting “50% to two-thirds of their requirements” because of supply issues.

The memory market is largely dominated by Micron, along with Korea-based Samsung and SK Hynix, which are also both in the midst of historic rallies.

“That is what happens when a market quickly enters a material shortage condition and pricing surges higher” while expenses “rise only modestly,” Mizuho’s Klein wrote in a note to clients early in the week. “You make a lot of money being overweight historic memory upturns when new capacity cannot be added fast enough. That simple.”

Agents drive ‘tremendous demand’

Beyond memory is insatiable demand for central processing units (CPUs), which underpin everyday computers and smartphones. They had mostly become an afterthought as model developers like OpenAI and Anthropic and cloud giants Google, Microsoft and Amazon were gobbling up Nvidia’s GPUs.

Now CPUs are back in the spotlight as momentum shifts from chatbots to AI agents. Bank of America estimates the data center CPU market could more than double from $27 billion in 2025 to $60 billion in 2030.

AMD’s quarterly results this week underscored the emerging trend, as earnings, revenue and guidance sailed past estimates on strong data center growth. The company has long led the CPU charge, and CEO Lisa Su said on the earnings call that AMD now expects 35% growth over the next three to five years in the server CPU market, up from a forecast of 18% growth that the company provided in November.

“Agents are really driving tremendous demand in the overall AI adoption cycle, and we’re very excited to be in the middle of it,” Su told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Wednesday, following the company’s earnings report.

Shares of Intel and AMD over the past year

Analysts at Goldman Sachs and Bernstein upgraded the stock to buy ratings, citing CPU tailwinds. And JPMorgan Chase analysts said the report “crystallizes the structural inflection underway across both server CPU and [datacenter] accelerator growth trajectories.”

Intel, which for many years towered over AMD in the CPU market before missing out on numerous major transitions, most notably AI, is in the midst of a revival sparked by a major investment from the U.S. government last year.

Intel’s stock had its best month on record in April, more than doubling, and has continued notching massive gains, rising 33% in the early days of May. The shares surged 13% on Tuesday following a Bloomberg report that Apple is in talks with Intel and Samsung to produce the main processors for its U.S. devices. They climbed another 14% on Friday after the Wall Street Journal reported that Intel and Apple have come to an agreement for the chipmaker to manufacture some processors for Apple devices.

Representatives from Intel and Apple declined to comment.

Elsewhere in the new AI stack, some companies are directly benefiting from partnerships with Nvidia.

Glass maker Corning, which celebrated its 175th anniversary this week, signed a massive deal with Nvidia on Wednesday that involves the development of three new U.S. factories dedicated entirely to optical technologies for the chip giant.

The deal gives Nvidia the right to invest up to $3.2 billion in Corning, and is likely a major step in Nvidia’s move away from copper cables and towards fiber-optic cables as it builds out its rack-scale systems. Earlier this year, Corning inked a $6 billion deal with Meta through 2030 to provide fiber-optic cables in the social media company’s AI data centers.

“We’re going to scale up optical at a scale that, quite frankly, no optical companies have ever enjoyed,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Thursday. He said the economy is going through the “single largest infrastructure buildout in human history.”

Corning’s recent boom on Wall Street pushed its stock to a record in February, when it finally passed its prior high from the dot-com era in 2000. It’s continued to soar in the months since.

Analysts are seeing plenty of other comparisons to the internet boom of the late 1990s, which preceded an extended market bust.

Jonathan Krinksy, an analyst at BTIG, said in a recent note that the magnitude of the markup in the semiconductor space resembles 1999. He warned of a 25% to 30% correction for the PHLX Semiconductor Index, a significant benchmark for the sector, which is up 66% so far this year.

“We have written ad nauseam about how extreme the move in semis has been — in many cases not seen since the dot-com bubble,” he said. “In some ways, however, this move is actually more extreme.”

—CNBC’s Katie Tarasov and Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this report.

WATCH: Rally in chips raises bubble concerns

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Nvidia embraces role of AI investor, pushing past $40 billion in equity bets this year

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Sat, 09 May 2026 15:23:43 +0000

Nvidia founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, speaks during the 29th annual Milken Institute Global Conference at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California on May 4, 2026.

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Nvidia stepped on the gas last year, putting cash into companies up and down the AI infrastructure stack and helping to fund businesses that could turn around and buy the chipmaker’s technology. It’s been a lucrative endeavor, as the company’s $5 billion bet on Intel is now worth over $25 billion, a historic return in a matter of months.

In 2026, the pace of deals has kicked into overdrive, with Nvidia already topping $40 billion in commitments and expanding its portfolio to include more public equities.

This week alone Nvidia forged an agreement with data center operator IREN, giving it the right to invest up to $2.1 billion in the company, a day after Nvidia struck a pact with Corning, allowing it to invest up to $3.2 billion in the 175-year-old glass maker. Shares of IREN and Corning popped on the announcements.

Nvidia has been the biggest winner of the artificial intelligence boom, producing the graphics processing units required to train AI models and run large workloads. The global scramble to secure GPUs has lifted Nvidia’s stock by more than 11-fold in four years, propelling the company to a roughly $5.2 trillion market cap and making it the most valuable business in the world.

To help the company grow its dominance beyond chips, Nvidia is financing the entire AI supply chain, ensuring it runs on Nvidia hardware and that there’s sufficient capacity to meet demand. But there’s growing concern in some corners of AI that Nvidia — like cloud providers Google and Amazon — is investing in other companies as a way to fuel its own growth.

Nvidia, which generated $97 billion in free cash flow last fiscal year, is backing some of the very companies that buy its chips and, in some cases, is leasing compute right back to them. Critics have compared it to the vendor financing that helped inflate the dot-com bubble.

Matthew Bryson, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said in a note that Nvidia’s investments and buildouts fit “squarely into the circular investment theme” that’s been driving fears around the market’s durability. However, Bryson sees the investments as underscoring Nvidia’s vision and creating a “competitive moat” if the company can execute.

An Nvidia spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Nvidia has signed at least seven multibillion-dollar investments this year with publicly traded companies. Additionally, it’s been part of roughly two dozen investment rounds in private companies, including some relatively early-stage deals, according to FactSet.

‘We don’t pick winners’

Its single largest bet was a $30 billion check for ChatGPT creator and longtime partner OpenAI. Nvidia also participated in massive funding rounds for Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI, shortly before it merged with SpaceX in February.

“There are so many great, amazing foundation model companies, and we try to invest in all of them,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during an April podcast appearance. “We don’t pick winners. We need to support everyone.”

With Nvidia’s earnings report for its fiscal first quarter less than two weeks away, shareholders will get a clearer picture of the size of the company’s expanding portfolio and its impact on financials.

During the last fiscal year, Nvidia invested $17.5 billion in private companies and infrastructure funds, “primarily to support early‑stage startups,” according to its annual filing with the SEC. The company said those investments include AI model companies that purchase its products directly or through cloud service providers.

Non-marketable equity securities (which are private company investments) held on Nvidia’s balance sheet swelled to $22.25 billion at the end of January from $3.39 billion a year earlier. The company reported gains on those assets as well as publicly held equities of $8.92 billion, up from $1.03 billion in the prior fiscal year, in part due its investment in Intel, which has turned into a stock market darling this year, up well over 200%.

On Nvidia’s last earnings call in February, Huang said, “Our investments are focused very squarely, strategically on expanding and deepening our ecosystem reach.”

The IREN deal this week includes an agreement that the data center company will deploy up to 5 gigawatts of Nvidia’s DSX-branded infrastructure designs intended to power AI workloads at facilities across the globe.

As part of the Corning deal, the glass company is building three new U.S. facilities dedicated to optical technologies for Nvidia, which will likely be turning to fiber-optic cables instead of copper as it builds out its rack-scale systems.

In March, Nvidia invested $2 billion in Marvell Technology as part of a strategic partnership to work on silicon photonics technology. That month it put the same amount in Lumentum and Coherent, two companies developing photonics technologies.

Then there are the so-called neoclouds. In January, Nvidia invested $2 billion in CoreWeave in a deal that involves building out data centers with Nvidia’s technology. It also invested $2 billion in Nebius Group, an AI cloud company, as part of an agreement on AI infrastructure deployment, fleet management, inference and AI factory design.

Chip analyst Jordan Klein at Mizuho called the deals with component makers “super smart by the CFO and team and a great use of cash,” because they help accelerate the development of critical technology and products that are in short supply. He’s more skeptical of the neocloud investments, which he said “feel more questionable to me and likely investors.”

“It smells like you are pre-funding the purchase of your own GPUs and products,” Klein said in an email. Still, he noted that the cloud providers have critical attributes like power and data center capacity that Nvidia needs.

Ben Bajarin at Creative Strategies shared a similar sentiment regarding IREN, telling CNBC, “The risk is that if the cycle turns, the market starts questioning how much of the demand was organic versus supported by Nvidia’s own balance sheet.”

As much as Nvidia is funneling money into publicly traded partners, those wagers are dwarfed by the chipmaker’s investment in OpenAI.

The $30 billion Nvidia pumped into OpenAI in late February came more than a decade after the companies started working together, though they’ve grown increasingly intertwined since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, the moment that sparked the generative AI frenzy.

Nvidia’s investment in OpenAI was originally going to be much bigger. In September, the companies said Nvidia would be putting in up to $100 billion over time into OpenAI as the AI company deployed 10 gigawatt’s of Nvidia’s systems. That deal never got off the ground as OpenAI pivoted away from developing data centers, instead leaning heavily on partners like Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon to piece together as much capacity as possible.

Huang said in March that investing $100 billion in OpenAI is probably “not in the cards,” and that the $30 billion deal “might be the last time” it writes a check before an IPO that could take place this year.

WATCH: Nvidia’s AI supply chain empire: Here’s what you need to know

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IREN inks AI infrastructure deal with Nvidia

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:54:42 +0000

Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Data center operator IREN announced a partnership with semiconductor giant Nvidia on Thursday.

IREN shares were volatile after news broke, but climbed 6% Friday.

Nvidia and IREN will deploy up to 5 gigawatts of the chip maker’s DSX-branded infrastructure designs intended to power artificial intelligence workloads throughout the Australian firm’s data center facilities across the world.

The data center operator will issue Nvidia a five-year right to purchase up to 30 million shares of its ordinary stock at an exercise price of $70 per share, the company said in an announcement. Nvidia will have the right to invest $2.1 billion into the company via the deal.

“AI factories are becoming foundational infrastructure for the global economy,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “Deploying these systems at scale requires deep integration across the full stack — compute, networking, software, power and operations.”

Nvidia has bolstered its stack by making similar deals involving multibillion-dollar purchase agreements with companies like Coherent, Lumentum and earlier this week, Corning.

In a separate release, IREN said it signed a five-year deal worth $3.4 billion to provide Nvidia with access to managed GPU cloud services “for its internal AI and research workloads.” The deployment will be at IREN’s existing data centers in Childress, Texas.

Although IREN previously specialized in data centers that were tailored for bitcoin mining, it’s been increasingly providing AI-related infrastructure services as part of the AI boom.

In Nov. 2025, IREN and Microsoft inked a multi-year $9.7 billion deal “to deliver GPU cloud infrastructure powered by NVIDIA GB300 GPUs” at its Childress, Texas. data center, the company said at the time. As part of that deal, IREN said it also “entered into an agreement” with Dell Technologies to purchase the GPUs and related computing gear for roughly $5.8 billion.

IREN one-day stock chart.

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