AI Infrastructure Stocks Surge as Qualcomm, Corning Announce Major Deals
Qualcomm and Corning deal announcements boosted AI-related stocks, with Intel, AMD, HPE, and Coherent rallying on Tuesday amid strong data center spending confidence.
Chipmakers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices gained 9% and 6% respectively, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise climbed 8% and photonics company Coherent added 7%. All of those companies have been massive winners for investors this year, with HPE and AMD more than doubling in value and Intel almost tripling, as the artificial intelligence infrastructure buildout expands beyond Nvidia.
Corning, the glassmaker whose fiber-optic technology is becoming a key part of AI data centers, jumped 8% on Tuesday, bringing its gain for the year to 90%. The company said it is entering into a multibillion-dollar partnership with Verizon to build fiber-optic cables for AI connectivity. In June, Corning struck a multibillion-dollar deal with Amazon, a month after Nvidia promised to invest up to $3.2 billion in the company to build three new fiber-optic manufacturing facilities in North Carolina and Texas.
Qualcomm said in a filing on Tuesday that it issued warrants to Amazon, allowing the cloud giant to acquire up to $4 billion worth of stock in the chipmaker. The move is part of a pact between the two companies to build out AI infrastructure, with Amazon Web Services purchasing up to $60 billion worth of Qualcomm's server chips and other technology.
Qualcomm CFO Akash Palkhiwala said on Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco that revenue from manufacturing chips for Amazon will begin to be realized in the December quarter and will be one of the core components in helping the company meet its $15 billion data center revenue target for fiscal 2029. At its investor day in June, Qualcomm said it was working with two unnamed data center companies, one of which was Amazon. Palkhiwala said Tuesday that the company is similarly proceeding with the other data center customer.
AMD CFO Jean Hu also spoke at the Goldman event. She said the total addressable market will now reach $3 trillion by 2030, after CEO Lisa Su said in July that the semiconductor industry would reach $2 trillion through 2028.
The rally in AI stocks comes amid public opposition to data center construction. According to a May 2026 Gallup poll, 71% of Americans oppose data centers being built in their communities. That sentiment has translated into financial risk, with Anthropic poised to list negative public opinion towards AI and data centers as a risk factor in its forthcoming IPO prospectus.