Summary
- BSRIA research says the global structured cabling market grew 21% in 2025 to $9.08bn.
- The data centre segment grew 54% in 2025 and now accounts for more than 41% of global structured cabling installations.
- AI capacity growth is feeding into fit-out, contractor workload, network infrastructure, and cabling supply chains.
BSRIA research indicates that data centres now account for more than 41% of all structured cabling installed globally, showing how AI infrastructure growth is reaching the physical network layer of the construction supply chain.
The organisation’s latest Structured Cabling Worldwide 2026 research, covered by Data Centre Review, found that the global structured cabling market grew 21% in 2025 to $9.08bn. The data centre segment grew 54% over the same period, making it the main driver of market expansion.
The trade coverage says data centres have nearly doubled their share of cabling installations compared with the 21% level recorded between 2015 and 2018. BSRIA identifies Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, and India among growth markets, while the US remains the largest outlier.
AI demand becomes installation work
Power and cooling dominate the AI data centre conversation, partly because they are visible in grid applications, substations, chillers, and public planning debates. Cabling is less exposed politically, but it is just as physical. High-density AI clusters depend on dense, low-latency connectivity between servers, storage, switching layers, management systems, and external networks.
The more compute is concentrated inside a hall, the more pressure falls on pathway design, cable routing, containment, labelling, fibre planning, testing, and installation discipline. Cabling must be coordinated with rack layouts, overhead or underfloor routes, busbar, pipework, fire systems, maintenance access, and cooling architecture. Dense AI rooms leave less tolerance for poor coordination because every system competes for space.
Cabling quality also feeds directly into operations. Poor cable management can obstruct airflow, restrict service access, increase human-error risk, and slow upgrades. In a conventional office building, structured cabling can often be treated as a late-stage trade package. In AI data centres, the internal network layer is part of capacity delivery.
Europe grows inside a stretched supply chain
BSRIA’s figures show how uneven the market has become. The US remains the dominant source of data centre cabling demand, reflecting the scale of its hyperscale and AI campus pipeline. That concentration can affect European delivery if manufacturers, distributors, and specialist installation teams prioritise large US programmes or if lead times extend for fibre, copper, trays, connectors, optics, and testing equipment.
European projects are still exposed to the same technical requirements, particularly in Germany, the Nordics, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the UK. They often face tighter planning, power, labour, and site constraints than US mega-campus projects, which makes coordination more difficult. Developers trying to compress build programmes may find that cabling design cannot be left until the final stages of fit-out.
The cabling market is also splitting. BSRIA points to a difference between data centre work, increasingly shaped by large-scale, high-value projects and fewer suppliers, and the broader LAN market serving offices and commercial buildings. Contractors working in data centres need different testing, documentation, cleanliness, labelling, redundancy, and change-control standards from those used in general commercial installations.
Technical architecture will also affect regional demand. Some AI clusters use direct attach cabling strategies in ways that differ from conventional structured cabling approaches. Choices around topology, performance, cost, upgradeability, cooling interaction, and equipment availability can all influence the amount and type of cabling installed.
Contractors and consultants will therefore need to treat the cabling package as a design-critical system. A site can have land, grid capacity, generators, cooling plant, and leases, yet still lose time if the connectivity layer is underspecified or supply constrained. The BSRIA figures show AI turning data centre construction into a wider industrial equipment market, pulling value into every system that helps dense compute run reliably.
The cable tray has become one of the quieter indicators of AI infrastructure demand. When more than two-fifths of global structured cabling installations are tied to data centres, the build-out is no longer confined to servers, switchgear, and cooling plant.
