PON in data centers keeps growing: Dell’Oro sees more than $3 billion in spending by 2030

Dell’Oro Group expects the PON market in data centers to keep expanding. According to the analyst firm, total cumulative spending on PON equipment for data centers between 2026 and 2030 will exceed $3 billion.

The segment is increasingly viewed as an alternative to traditional access architectures inside data centers. PON can simplify infrastructure, reduce the amount of active equipment, and improve the efficiency of network deployments in data center environments.

Growing interest in these solutions is tied to rising data center workloads, the expansion of cloud services, and the need for more cost-effective and scalable network models. As the market develops, PON could become a meaningful niche within optical networking for server and cloud infrastructure.

Dell’Oro notes that the market is still in an early formation phase, but demand trends point to steady growth in PON adoption beyond classic fixed-network access use cases.