Prysmian has signed a €5.5bn, 10-year agreement with Molex, the Koch Industries-owned connector and cable maker, to supply optical cable for use inside AI data centres.
Unusually for a supply deal of this size, Molex is putting €550m on the table upfront, a rare piece of cash certainty in a market where most commitments arrive as forecasts.
The cabling that shuttles data between racks and chips has become one of the quieter constraints on AI buildout, which is why Nvidia alone has spent billions on photonics to route around copper’s limits.
Prysmian is coming at the same problem from the other end of the cable, with the fibre that carries traffic once it leaves the chip.
The optical cable at the centre of the deal is meant for deployment inside the data centre itself, the dense internal wiring that links servers and switching gear, rather than the long-haul networks that connect one site to the next.
