Who makes board-level connectors & sockets for AI data centers

Connectors sit at nearly every junction in the rack: CPU and GPU sockets attach silicon to the baseboard (4.03), board-to-board connectors link trays together, and I/O cages (4.07a) terminate the optical and copper interconnect coming off layer 3. As pin counts, power currents and signal speeds all rise with each GPU generation, socket and connector design becomes a harder mechanical and electrical problem — more contact points, tighter tolerances on insertion force and contact resistance, and more attention to high-speed signal integrity through the connector itself. AI racks also simply need more connectors per system than a conventional server, both because there are more trays to link and because power delivery at rack scale increasingly moves through busbars and whips (4.15) rather than cables, each with its own connector interface. For investors, this tier tends to be sticky once a connector is designed into a socket or board generation, since requalifying a different supplier's socket against a new GPU package is not a drop-in swap; the interesting question by generation is who wins the socket design-in for the next GPU package.