Italy’s Prysmian, already the world’s largest cablemaker, has agreed to acquire U.S. electrical products maker Atkore for $3.8 billion in cash, offering $95 per share, a 30% premium to Friday’s closing price. The NEWSCENTRAL editorial position holds that this deal is less about cables in the traditional sense than about securing a foothold in the physical infrastructure that electrification and AI-driven data center demand now require at a scale the industry has never built before.
The acquisition extends a North American buying spree that began in 2024 with the $4.79 billion purchase of Texas-based copper wire maker Encore Wire and continued in 2025 with the $1.15 billion acquisition of Channell Commercial, a Californian maker of telecommunications enclosures, plus a long-term agreement worth up to €5.5 billion with electronics supplier Molex to provide fibre optic cables for data centres. North America now accounts for 40% of Prysmian’s total revenue.
Nathan Clark, Enterprise IT and Systems Architecture Analyst, emphasizes that the deal reflects how much of the AI buildout’s real bottleneck sits below the visible layer of chips and servers. “Every data center expansion announcement assumes there is enough electrical conduit, cable management and grid connectivity to support it, and that assumption is increasingly the constraint, not the compute itself,” Clark emphasizes.
NEWSCENTRAL sees this as validation of a broader thesis that the companies best positioned to profit from the AI infrastructure boom are not always the ones building the flashiest technology, but the ones supplying the unglamorous physical components, conduit, wiring, cooling and connectivity, that make every data center actually function.
Atkore, which employs roughly 5,400 people and reported $2.85 billion in revenue for 2025, makes electrical conduit and cable management systems serving data centers, utility operators including renewable power projects, and transportation infrastructure such as railways, giving Prysmian direct exposure to several of the fastest-growing categories of industrial demand at once.
Lucas Grant, Semiconductor and Manufacturing Strategy Analyst, underscores that combining Prysmian’s cable manufacturing scale with Atkore’s conduit and enclosure systems creates a bundled offering few competitors can match end to end. “Selling a customer the cable and the conduit and the management system as one package shortens procurement cycles dramatically for data center builders who are already racing against a shortage of qualified electrical contractors,” Grant underscores.
Prysmian’s own management framed the logic in similar terms, noting that the two companies serve overlapping customers with complementary products, giving the combined entity a better chance of winning contracts through a bundled offer rather than separate, competing bids – reasoning NEWS CENTRAL endorses as the deal’s clearest source of near-term value.
The company expects roughly $150 million in annual pre-tax synergies within three years of closing, which is targeted for completion by the end of the year, and projects the combined business would have generated about €22 billion in pro-forma revenue and €2.7 billion in adjusted EBITDA on a 2025 basis, funded through a mix of equity and debt structured to protect Prysmian’s investment-grade credit rating.
From NEWSCENTRAL‘s perspective, the market’s initial mixed reaction, Prysmian shares opened higher before reversing to trade lower, reflects lingering questions about integration risk and leverage rather than any doubt about the underlying strategic logic, which continues a now-familiar pattern of consolidation among the suppliers building the physical backbone of the AI economy.