The Wires & Switches — Networking & Connectors
Even with light pipes, you still need wires, switches, and sockets. A lot of them.
An AI data center has tens of thousands of physical connections — between GPUs, between racks, between rows. Each one needs a connector, and the long-haul ones need 'retimers' to clean up the signal. Astera Labs owns the retimer market. Credo owns the AI cable market. Arista and Cisco own the Ethernet-switch market. And Amphenol sits underneath all of it making the physical sockets that everything plugs into. Five companies tax every AI rack ever shipped.
Hyperscalers can buy GPUs from anyone. The fabric that connects them is bought from a much smaller list.
5 names on the watchlist
PCIe Gen 6 retimer monopoly + Scorpio scale-up fabric
Astera Labs makes the 'glue chips' that connect GPUs to each other and to memory inside an AI rack — including PCIe retimers (which boost signal strength so the chips can actually talk) and the new Scorpio fabric switches. Q1 2026 sales were $308M, up 91% YoY. Their 320-lane Scorpio X-Series is shipping to hyperscalers now.
ZeroFlap AECs — the de facto cabling standard
Credo's 'Active Electrical Cables' (AECs) are the cables hyperscalers are standardizing on for AI server-to-server links . 'ZeroFlap' branding promises no link drops at AI workloads. Quietly winning the AI cabling war.
Only Ethernet-AI fabric vendor at GB200 scale
Arista makes the Ethernet switches that connect every AI rack to every other AI rack . Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle all use them. They're the only vendor proven at NVIDIA GB200 deployment scale. Boring, dominant, prints money.
Connectors for every AI server — the everyone-needs-it tax
Amphenol makes the physical connectors and sockets in every AI server, NVLink rack, and CPO module . Every cable, every backplane, every rack pays a small Amphenol toll. The most boring and most reliable infrastructure name on the page.
Acacia + 1.6T silicon photonics dark horse
Often dismissed as a legacy networking company, but Cisco's Acacia subsidiary makes silicon-photonic transceivers at 1.6T . Trades cheap relative to Arista. Dark-horse beneficiary if CPO adoption pulls Acacia into the spotlight.
- Dylan Bristot, AI Bottlenecks · whatllm.org · May 2026