- Corning’s results were led by its Optical Communications division, where sales grew 32% from the same quarter last year
- The company is also in the midst of a multi-year corporate growth strategy — its Springboard plan
- Corning’s CEO talked about the technology in data centers that is driving growth for the company
Corning this week reported revenue of $4.74 billion for its second quarter 2026, topping estimates of $4.61 billion; and it reported earnings per share of $.78, topping estimates of $.76. Nevertheless, the company’s stock took a drop after the earnings, which it has since recovered from.
The company expects core revenue between $4.9 billion to $5 billion by the third quarter and earnings per share of between $0.85 to $0.89. Corning says it expects an annualized run-rate of $20 billion for 2026. This compares to a roughly $17.6 billion annualized core sales run rate at the end of 2025.
Corning’s results were led by its Optical Communications division, where sales grew 32% from the same quarter last year to over $2 billion, and net income grew 77% to $438 million. Of course, the company also manufactures glass for solar panels, cell phone screens and the like, and those businesses factor into its earnings results.
But its optical connectivity business is doing well. In May, it announced a partnership with Nvidia to construct three new manufacturing plants in the U.S. to build advanced optical connectivity solutions.
And in June, Corning announced a multibillion-dollar agreement with Amazon to supply the optical fiber, cable and connectivity solutions that power Amazon's expanding data center infrastructure across the U.S.
Corning is also in the midst of a multi-year corporate growth strategy — its Springboard plan — which the company launched in late 2023.
Wendell Weeks, Corning’s president and CEO, said on this week’s earnings call, “We launched Springboard from Quarter 4, 2023 with an annualized sales run rate of $13 billion. Over the past 2.5 years, we have significantly increased our sales, and we have successfully transformed the financial profile of the company. Our plan is to now grow our annualized sales run rate to $20 billion by the end of 2026, $30 billion by the end of 2028, and $40 billion by the end of 2030.”
GPUs in data centers for AI
Weeks also talked about Corning’s opportunity to grow because of the demand for fiber optics in data centers, driven by the growth of AI.
“At the most basic level, assuming no changes to the network, we would grow as GPUs grow,” he said. “The insight that we'd like to reiterate today is some of the potential network changes that offer us the opportunity to grow faster than GPUs.”
He said the first driver is cluster-size growth. The logic is that cluster sizes greater than 130,000 GPUs will require a third optical layer. Basically, 3 layers divided by 2 layers yields 50% more content per GPU for very large clusters. “These large clusters are a fast-growing segment of AI factories,” said Weeks. “Therefore, cluster-size growth is a positive for Corning relative to GPU growth.”
Another driver for Corning’s optical communications business is that optical is starting to replace copper in data centers’ scale-up networks. Scale-up refers to connectivity within a cluster of GPUs, while scale-out refers to connecting multiple servers or clusters.
“While the timing of adoption and penetration are very difficult to predict, the size of the opportunity for an increase in optical content is quite large,” Weeks concluded.
Read more about Corning:
Corning to build 3 new optical plants in the U.S. with a little ($500M) help from Nvidia
Amazon and Corning announce multi-billion-dollar deal for fiber supply