TREE NEWS reports: Nexans Chief Financial Officer Vincent Piquet said cable production capacity is emerging as a bottleneck for AI-driven data center construction, as demand growth outpaces the industry’s ability to expand output. He told Reuters that global cable capacity is tight and that building a new cross-linked polyethylene (XLPE) cable line, known in the industry as a CV line, takes about three years, limiting how fast suppliers can respond. “Things can’t move quickly, and the people building these data centers are in a big hurry,” Piquet said.
Nexans CFO: Cable Capacity Now a Bottleneck for AI Data Centers
The bottleneck Piquet describes is a lead-time problem, not a demand problem: three years to bring a CV line online means cable supply is effectively fixed through the current buildout cycle, regardless of how much capital data center developers are willing to spend. That shifts leverage toward incumbents with existing capacity and makes cable procurement a scheduling constraint for project timelines, not just a cost line. The open question is whether the tightness stays confined to XLPE cable or signals broader lead-time inflation across electrical infrastructure for AI campuses.
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