How Rack Power Density Is Opening a New Market for Active Copper

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As AI racks grow too dense to power and cool, hyperscalers are splitting their scale-up domains across multiple cabinets. The short links in between are too far for passive copper, too power-hungry for DSP cables, and too wasteful for optics. That gap is exactly where active copper cables (ACC) are moving in, and a handful of chip vendors are racing to own it.

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This deep dive walks you from the physics to the players:

Why rising rack power, not data rate, is the real force reshaping AI interconnects
How Meta's Catalina rack turns a power problem into 160-plus active copper links
Which interconnect actually wins the short hop between racks, and why
A full competitive teardown of the five vendors fighting for ACC: Semtech, Marvell, MACOM, Ciena/Nubis, and the conspicuous one sitting it out

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