Jackson is Wired for $100 Million!
Jackson is stepping into the next chapter of America’s digital buildout with a $100 million investment that will expand local manufacturing of the fiber-optic cable keeping homes, businesses and data centers connected.
What Jackson Is Actually Making
Prysmian plans to invest approximately $100 million in its Jackson operation, doubling the facility’s current footprint and creating 100 jobs. The expansion will increase production of loose-tube and drop optical fiber cables as demand grows for broadband, data centers and increasingly data-hungry technology.
Strip away the industry terminology and Jackson’s role becomes easier to picture. Fiber-optic cable carries information as pulses of light through extremely thin strands of glass. Loose-tube cable protects groups of those fibers as they travel through outdoor networks. Drop cable handles another crucial stretch, making the connection that ultimately reaches homes and businesses.
So while phones, laptops and smart televisions spend plenty of time bragging about being wireless, much of what reaches them has already traveled through a decidedly physical network.
Prysmian says demand is accelerating as data centers expand and AI changes how those facilities are designed, including a push for greater fiber density and faster connections. Jackson will be helping manufacture the infrastructure behind that growth.
From Copper to the Next Connection
The plant has already lived through one major technological pivot.
In 2022, Prysmian announced a $30 million investment to convert the Jackson operation from copper-cable manufacturing to optical cable. The company described it at the time as its first plant to be retooled to produce an entirely different product.
Four years later, that change has become the foundation for a much larger bet.
The new project is expected to double both the Jackson facility’s footprint and optical-cable capacity. A groundbreaking celebration is planned for Oct. 15, with construction expected to take approximately 20 months.
For Jackson, that means the story is bigger than adding square footage to a factory. An established manufacturing operation that once made copper cable is being reshaped around the infrastructure carrying the country’s growing appetite for data.
Every video call, streaming movie, cloud backup and AI request feels almost instantaneous. Somewhere underneath it, however, there are cables doing the heavy lifting. Jackson is preparing to make considerably more of them.
For help with the technology at your end of the connection, find Computer & I.T. firms through the Guide to Tennessee directory at https://www.guidetotennessee.com/computer-i-t-firms.
