A 174-year-old American materials firm, based in the town of Corning in upstate New York, a place of just over 10,000 people. The company has repeatedly found itself at the cutting edge of technology: in the late 19th century it made the encasements for Edison's light bulbs; in the early 20th century it invented Pyrex.
Under Wendell Weeks, Corning's fibre optics became an essential part of the infrastructure of the internet. In the 1990s fibre-optic cables made Corning a big beneficiary of the dotcom boom—a household name in the era—and then a victim of the bust. The company is now a major supplier of the cables that run through data centres. Meta's giant data centre in Louisiana requires perhaps 8m miles of cable, enough to connect all the single-family homes in New York state.
In early 2007 Steve Jobs asked Corning for a scratch-resistant glass case for the first iPhone. Weeks's team developed a composition that fulfilled the brief, drawing on work the firm had done decades earlier on thickened glass for car windshields. That first foray into smartphone glass spawned a division called Gorilla Glass, which has since earned the scrutiny of an antitrust investigation by the European Commission.
In late 2025 a Chinese-American was convicted of stealing fibre-laser technology with military applications from a joint project between Corning and DARPA, a research arm of America's Department of War, after being encouraged to do so by the Chinese government.
Weeks calls strength, scratch resistance and other kinds of valuable properties "vectors". He operates on the assumption that making progress on a vector will work out well for Corning, even if the precise application is not yet known. For optical communications, density—fitting more cabling in a given space—is one such vector.
Your reasoning is excellent -- it's only your basic assumptions that are wrong.