Nokia Highlights Advancing Connectivity for the AI Supercycle
Introduction
Nokia’s combined SReXperts and Wavelengths Americas event in San Diego made one point clear. IP and optical are now one architecture, and the AI supercycle is requiring them to make significant investments in their supply chain and manufacturing capabilities to meet customer demand. The AI supercycle is driving traffic that metro, long haul, and DCI designs were not built to absorb. Coherent pluggables, scale across fabrics, automation, and security sit at the center of how operators and neo clouds will monetize that demand
This year’s theme, advancing connectivity, showed up in every major keynote, including a virtual David Heard, who was at a supply chain event.
Keynotes Highlight Rapid Change in Nokia as they move to Hyperscale Speeds
David Heard opened the joint plenaries with Nokia’s network infrastructure vision. After the Infinera close, Nokia has a broader optical and routing stack with new Data Center switches and a clearer claim on data center interconnect as well as infrastructure inside the data center. AI clusters are no longer confined to a single hall. Training remains concentrated, but inference is spreading. Scale across between buildings is becoming as important as scale out inside a fabric. Heard treated IP, optical, and data center networking as one portfolio.
Deepening the Optical Story with Coherent Modules (ZR, ZR+ and upcoming Coherent Lite)
Mixture of experts models, longer context windows, and disaggregated inference create more east-west and more site-to-site traffic. Optical and routing have to absorb that together. Nokia framed this as the industry must speed up assembly of ZR/ZR+ modules from one every few minutes to one every few seconds. This highlights the pace at which customers want to consume networking equipment.
Customer panels highlighted the pace of growth of Neocloud and Hyperscalers and that growth is not just at Hyperscalers or foundational labs. Operators are leaning into capacity and automation. They are cautious, but we feel like a massive surge of bandwidth growth is ahead of them.
Conclusion
San Diego confirmed what Phoenix started last year. Nokia + Infinera has quickly become one Nokia. AI traffic is rewriting IP and optical at the same time, and Nokia is leveraging these relationships to expand in the data center. Overall, when we include all the AI networks inside and outside of the data center, this network opportunity is on pace to exceed $1T a year of spend early next decade. The operators who treat routing, optics, and operations as one architecture will capture the interconnect spend. The ones who keep them in silos will spend more power and more time for less capacity.