Corning Inc. fiber factory featured on '60 Minutes' profile of U.S. Commerce Secretary

Chris Potter, Corning Leader
·2 min read
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Corning Inc. was featured prominently on a "60 Minutes" segment Sunday night profiling U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

Raimondo and 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl toured Corning Inc.’s fiber optic cable manufacturing factory in North Carolina.

The Corning, N.Y.-based company is expanding fiber optic production partially in response to the Internet for All initiative included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Some 10 million miles of new cable are needed to connect 24 million Americans who lack access to high-speed internet.

“What’s inside of (the cable) is actually one of the most precise products ever manufactured by man,” Corning Inc. CEO Wendell Weeks said during the tour.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo speaks at an event marking the opening of Corning, Inc.'s newest optical cable manufacturing campus in Hickory, North Carolina in March 2023.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo speaks at an event marking the opening of Corning, Inc.'s newest optical cable manufacturing campus in Hickory, North Carolina in March 2023.

Corning Inc. opened its newest optical cable manufacturing campus in Hickory, North Carolina in 2023, and in 2022, the company announced plans to build a new cable manufacturing facility near Phoenix, Arizona. The project extended Corning's “strategic investments in optical fiber, cable, and connectivity solutions to meet record demand.”

“We’ve invested another half billion dollars and doubled our footprint for the U.S.,” Weeks told Raimondo and Stahl.

The "60 Minutes" segment also highlighted efforts to bring semiconductor chip manufacturing to American soil through the CHIPS and Science Act.

More: Winner of 'Blown Away' on Netflix takes up residency in Corning this week. What to know

Who is Gina Raimondo?

Raimondo, 52, is a former venture capitalist who served as governor of Rhode Island before joining the Biden Administration. Stahl described her as “a rising star” of the Democratic Party who “seems to have come out of nowhere” to turn “a second-tier agency into a center of job creation, manufacturing and national security.”

“As Commerce Secretary she’s running new projects that could touch the lives of every American,” Stahl said. “And she’s helping lead the expanding cold war with China and confront Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. The battlefield for both those conflicts is technology.”

Corning, Inc.'s newest optical cable manufacturing campus in Hickory, North Carolina formally opened in March 2023.
Corning, Inc.'s newest optical cable manufacturing campus in Hickory, North Carolina formally opened in March 2023.

The segment explored Raimondo’s youth and the impact of her father losing his manufacturing job when his employer moved operations to China.

“We allowed manufacturing in this country to wither on the vine in search of cheaper labor in Asia, cheaper capital in Asia and here we are,” Raimondo said. “We just pursued profit over national security.”

More: Former Corning Inc. Headquarters Building, others sit empty. What's next for company?

How to watch

If you missed the broadcast Sunday night, the full episode can be streamed at cbsnews.com/60-minutes

The episode also features segments on comedian Kevin Hart and a forgotten Nazi camp built on British soil.

This article originally appeared on The Leader: Corning Inc. featured on '60 Minutes' profile. What to know