#ai-data-centers

#ai-data-centers

Corning Incorporated ( NYSE:GLW) has delivered one of 2026's most impressive rallies, climbing 50.2% year-to-date and 46% over the past month. Corning's 2026 is so good, it's now the 6th top performing stock in the entire S&P 500. The 175-year-old materials science company is riding three converging waves: stellar earnings execution, a massive partnership with Meta, and surging demand for AI data center infrastructure.

As Anthropic invests in more AI infrastructure, it says it will "will cover electricity price increases that consumers face from our data centers," per a post to its website this week. "[AI] companies shouldn't leave American ratepayers to pick up the tab." Data centers can hike electricity costs because they drive up electricity demand and they can require costly infrastructure upgrades, the costs of which get passed on to ratepayers.

The Associated Builders and Contractors trade group estimated in a report last month the industry will need to bring in 456,000 new workers in 2027, up 30.7% from the 349,000 needed this year. "Failing to do so will worsen labor shortages, especially in certain occupations and regions, placing further upward pressure on labor costs," ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu warned in a statement.

"There's enormous issues for our economy and for our democracy that have got to be dealt with," Sanders said. "And I feel we're not ready to do that."

A lot of the hoopla started when investors questioned Oracle's ( NASDAQ:ORCL) heavy debt load for the OpenAI deal. Capital expenditures came under pressure, and people wondered how OpenAI would be able to pay $300 billion over five years. That contract starts in 2027, and rumors circulated that OpenAI pushed back its data center completion to 2028, a year later than initially planned. It put more pressure on AI data center providers like IREN, even though Oracle refuted the rumor on the same day.

When Sam Altman said one year ago that OpenAI's Roman Empire is the actual Roman Empire, he wasn't kidding. In the same way that the Romans gradually amassed an empire of land spanning three continents and one-ninth of the Earth's circumference, the CEO and his cohort are now dotting the planet with their own latifundia-not agricultural estates, but AI data centers.

The land around Hassayampa Ranch, 50 miles west of Phoenix, is dotted with saguaro cacti and home to coyotes, jackrabbits, and rattlesnakes. Its few hundred human residents were largely drawn by the tranquility and clear skies for stargazing. But several of the biggest names in Silicon Valley are suddenly very interested in what happens on this serene stretch of desert.

When Oracle failed to meet revenue expectations and suggested that large-scale data centers may not be ready until 2028, it immediately chilled sentiment across the entire sector. On the same day the Dow pushed to new highs, the Nasdaq was hit hard, with anything even loosely tied to AI selling off aggressively. That divergence told us the market was reassessing the timeline, not the technology.

One afternoon in June 2024, I stood up against the fence of a sprawling industrial facility a few miles outside of Corsicana, Texas. Over a metal gate, I watched a bright yellow excavator claw at the dirt and flatbed trucks shuttle to and fro. A hangar-like structure with a gleaming white roof stretched hundreds of meters along the opposite perimeter. The company that owned the plot, Riot Platforms, was busily constructing the world's largest bitcoin mine.

Even so, Microsoft has the depth and ecosystem strength to continue doubling down on AI data centers, said Prabhu Ram, VP for industry research at Cybermedia Research.

Few sectors this year have delivered the kind of explosive gains seen in artificial intelligence (AI)-focused data center operators. IREN ( NASDAQ:IREN ) is a former Bitcoin miner turned renewable-powered AI cloud provider and surged more than 400% year-to-date at its peak. Nebius Group ( NASDAQ:NBIS ) - the rebranded AI infrastructure arm of what was once Russian search giant Yandex - climbed over 500% from its spring lows as it secured massive GPU deals.

As the tech industry funnels billions into AI data centers, chip makers both big and small are ramping up innovation around the technology that connects chips to other chips, and server racks to other server racks. Networking technology has been around since the dawn of the computer, critically connecting mainframes so they can share data. In the world of semiconductors, networking plays a part at almost every level of the stack-from the interconnect between transistors on the chip itself,