Fiber took 47.6% of the $10.65bn data center cable market in 2025, study says

The study estimated that an AI-oriented data hall carried about $1.07m of cabling content per megawatt in 2025, against roughly $0.43m for a conventional hall. It projected the total cable market would reach $27.29bn by 2035, a 9.87% compound annual growth rate. The figures are the firm's estimates and forecasts.

Why AI halls use more fiber

GPU clusters rely on high-capacity back-end fabrics that connect large numbers of accelerators, the study says, producing far higher fiber counts than traditional enterprise or cloud environments. In some AI rack configurations, inter-rack connectivity can exceed 3,000 fibers, as 400G, 800G and emerging 1.6T architectures shorten the practical reach of copper.

Copper's limits are distance and heat. Tech Times reported that at 200 Gb/s per lane, passive copper cables can no longer reliably span a single server rack without signal degradation and excess heat. EE Times put the usual copper ceiling at 100 metres, beyond which attenuation and crosstalk become major hurdles, while commercial fiber links regularly achieve 400-800 Gbps and advanced optical interconnects reach up to 1.6 Tbps over kilometres.

Fiber's share of the market

Fiber's $5.07bn of 2025 revenue is projected to reach $15.94bn by 2035, a 12.14% compound annual rate, faster than the 9.87% forecast for the whole market. Copper held 31.4% of 2025 revenue and power cable 21.0%, leaving fiber the largest single segment.

The cable market is small next to the facilities it serves: EE Times reported that data center capital expenditure is set to reach nearly $250bn in 2025, and cited surveys of hyperscale providers indicating about 85% of new backbone deployments by the end of 2025 would use fiber rather than copper.

Who buys the cable

Hyperscale data centers were the largest buyer category, generating about $4.95bn and 46.5% of demand in 2025, the study found. Colocation took 25.3%, enterprise data centers 18.4% and GPU and neocloud providers 9.8%, but that smallest group is the fastest-growing, with spending projected to advance at a 12.21% compound annual rate through 2035.

High-speed Ethernet and GPU fabric connectivity accounted for about $2.92bn in 2025 and is forecast to reach $10.40bn by 2035, overtaking conventional networking connectivity before the end of the decade.

What the study projects

AI facilities accounted for an estimated 35% of new capacity in 2025, a share the study projects will reach 66% by 2035. It models annual new IT capacity additions rising from about 12.0 GW in 2025 to 27.0 GW in 2035, with new construction accounting for about 73.8% of cable spending in 2025.

The study also said large hyperscalers and connectivity suppliers are increasingly securing fiber capacity years before data center campuses enter service, reducing supply uncertainty and supporting manufacturing expansion.