Prysmian has signed a €5.5bn, 10-year agreement with Molex, the Koch-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.
Prysmian said its Digital Solutions arm would supply that cable to Molex under the agreement, feeding a part of the build that grows with every additional rack of AI hardware.
The Milan-based group framed the arrangement as the anchor of a much larger bet. It expects up to €10bn in cumulative additional revenue from hyperscalers and data centre providers through 2035, and up to €1.1bn a year from 2031 once the new capacity is running.
Those are ceilings rather than commitments, and the €5.5bn Molex agreement is the floor beneath them. The upfront €550m gives Prysmian something most suppliers to the AI buildout do not have, a booked payment it can point to before the demand it is forecasting actually materialises.
To get there, Prysmian is allocating €1.25bn of capacity investment through 2031. The company said the spending would more than double its optical fibre production capacity in the United States, the market where data centre demand has been most acute.
The expansion comes with a headcount attached. Prysmian expects the programme to create more than 1,000 jobs worldwide, 600 of them in the US, spread across the optical cable and fibre production it plans to add at facilities on both sides of the Atlantic.
That European footprint matters at a moment when the continent is trying to build out its own compute base, and when researchers keep warning that sovereign AI ambitions could stall on the physical limits of data centre supply.
Prysmian is pitching itself as one of the picks-and-shovels suppliers to that expansion rather than a builder of the sites themselves.
The demand it is chasing is the same wave driving hyperscaler capital spending to record levels. Prysmian pointed to the modernisation of AI infrastructure, pressure on energy efficiency, and rising fibre density inside the data hall as the forces pulling more cable into each new build.
Higher fibre density is the part that scales with AI directly. As operators pack more accelerators into a hall and push more traffic between them, the count of optical connections rises, and each of those connections is cable that a supplier like Prysmian has to make.
“This is a transformative moment for Prysmian’s Digital Solutions,” said chief executive Massimo Battaini, in a statement tying the deal to the company’s push deeper into data centre connectivity.
Molex framed it as a way to serve shared accounts more reliably. “We’re excited about this long-term agreement with Prysmian because it enables us to better support our mutual customers,” said Joe Nelligan, the company’s chief executive.
What the two companies did not spell out is how the €10bn revenue ceiling breaks down by customer, or which hyperscalers sit behind the forecast.
Prysmian’s guidance points to 2031 as the year the new fibre lines are meant to be fully earning, with the upfront €550m from Molex booked well ahead of that.
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