en.Wedoany.com Reported - On June 2, Hakusan, a Japanese optical connectivity component company under the Lightera Group, announced plans to invest approximately 5 billion yen to build a new manufacturing plant in Kahoku City, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. The new plant is expected to begin operations around April 2028 and will expand production capacity for next-generation high-density optical connectivity solutions to meet the demands of AI data centers.

The investment focuses on TMT Ferrules, a key component in ultra-compact multi-fiber optical connectors. Hakusan stated that the new plant will become the primary production base for its TMT Ferrules and will support the multi-source supply agreement reached by Hakusan, SANWA Technologies, and US Conec in February of this year. For AI data centers, GPU clusters, cloud computing, and high-performance computing applications are continuously driving up data transmission density within racks, between racks, and across campus-level data centers. Traditional connector sizes, cabling space, and port density are gradually becoming limiting factors for infrastructure expansion. The value of VSFF (Very Small Form Factor) optical connectors lies in accommodating more fiber connections within a more limited space, while supporting upgrades in high-density cabling, switching equipment, and optical modules, thereby reducing the physical deployment pressure during large-scale data center expansion. By locating the new plant in Kahoku City, Ishikawa Prefecture, with a planned site area of approximately 20,000 square meters, and planning to relocate its headquarters functions to the facility after completion, Hakusan indicates that this project is not merely about supplementing production lines, but rather establishing high-precision optical connectivity component manufacturing as a core production capacity for the company's next phase.

While optical connectivity components may seem like a niche segment in the data center industry chain, they have a significant impact on overall network expansion. AI training and inference clusters demand higher east-west traffic, low-loss connections, stable insertion/removal cycles, and high-density cabling. The compatibility between connectors, ferrules, optical cables, patch panels, and switching equipment directly affects data center construction timelines, maintenance convenience, and long-term reliability.

With over 35 years of experience in manufacturing high-precision, high-density connectivity solutions, Hakusan is one of the early developers of MT ferrules. As AI data center construction enters a phase of more intensive hardware investment, the supply capacity of optical connectivity components is transitioning from a supporting role in the background to a constraining factor in the foreground. When expanding next-generation data centers, major cloud service providers and network operators typically secure key component supply chains in advance to avoid project delays caused by unstable delivery of optical connectivity components, optical modules, or cabling systems. If the construction of this new plant proceeds as planned, it will enhance Hakusan's ability to provide stable supply to global customers and also bolster Lightera's integrated service capabilities in optical fiber, cables, connectors, and data center interconnection solutions. For Japan's domestic manufacturing industry, this project also extends the manufacturing advantages in high-value-added segments of precision components, communication infrastructure, and data center supply chains.

This investment also reflects that competition in AI data centers is extending to the more fundamental physical connectivity layer. In the past, market attention was more focused on GPUs, servers, liquid cooling, power, and campus site selection. However, as cluster scales increase, the density, loss, standardization, and maintainability of optical interconnection systems equally affect the construction efficiency of computing infrastructure. The ultra-compact multi-fiber connector route represented by TMT Ferrules can serve higher port density and more complex fiber management needs, making it suitable for dense cabling environments in hyperscale data centers, cloud computing centers, and high-performance computing facilities.

Subsequent milestones for the project include the construction progress of the new plant, the production ramp-up schedule around 2028, the capacity ramp-up of TMT Ferrules, and the implementation results of the multi-source supply agreement among global customers. If the new plant is successfully operational, Hakusan will gain stronger production capacity support in the AI data center optical connectivity component supply chain, and Japan's precision optical connectivity manufacturing will be further embedded in the global data center expansion cycle.

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