AI and cloud providers
Advanced connectivity unlocks the full potential of your AI and cloud infrastructure
Understanding your business landscape
As your AI ambitions grow, you need networks that expand your reach without compromising performance, help you move fast with confidence and maximize the return on your AI investments. Wherever you place and distribute your assets, Nokia connects systems within and across data centers with maximum speed and reliability, so networking never gets in the way of your business objectives or superior customer experiences.
We deliver trusted IP, optical and data center networking with extreme automation and operational visibility that allows you to embrace change. As your AI traffic scales, and space and power constraints drive distribution of data center assets, we help you create a seamless, secure infrastructure that interconnects data centers, clouds and the WAN to support profitable growth.
AI supercycle fuels traffic growth
Global traffic projected to grow 5x to 3 EB/mo by 2034 (Bell Labs Global Network Traffic report, moderate case)
Source: Nokia Global Network Traffic Report
Data centers proliferate
8,378 data centers in public clouds by 2030 (6.6% CAGR)1, and edge data centers are ramping up with 1,200 edge data centers by end of 2026 (75% CAGR) 2
Sources: (1) ABI Research, (2) STL Partners
Early use cases are driven by productivity gains
83% of enterprises intend to use generative AI over the next two years, 51% to enhance customer service
Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence
Data center networks for the AI era
- Data center fabrics for network connectivity within the data center
- Data center interconnectivity using IP and Optical technologies to enable network connectivity between data centers, clouds, the WAN, and the internet.
Address the AI-scale scenarios your teams run every day
Data center networking for AI and cloud workloads
Explore the most advanced, flexible and automated data center fabric solution ever designed, giving you the tools to operate data centers of any scale with the agility and visibility of the world’s most advanced infrastructures.
Data center interconnection for AI and cloud providers
Seamlessly and securely interconnect AI and cloud data centers and service regions with resilient, high-capacity optical connectivity between locations, through the seas and across digital corridors
DC gateway and IP routing
Deliver robust IP connectivity across metros and continents, with performance and resiliency designed to handle AI traffic growth for the world’s leading AI, cloud and digital infrastructure providers.
Future-proof infrastructure security
Prepare for future threats with quantum-safe approaches that protect critical connectivity over time.
Why Nokia
As AI reshapes the demands on your infrastructure, speed and capacity are not your only challenges. You also need to ensure resiliency, drive efficiency and minimize risk. You need to deliver reliable performance across a rapidly changing distributed environment, reduce the human effort required to operate it and protect critical connectivity as threats evolve. Nokia brings the scale, reliability, and security to help keep your network performant and resilient, so your teams can focus on accelerating progress rather than managing network complexity.
AI and cloud solutions
Data Center Fabric
Bring new levels of reliability, simplicity and adaptability to your data center switching and cloud infrastructures.
Optical Data Center Interconnect
Maximizing network infrastructure ROI in the era of AI.
ICE-D Intra Data Center Optics
Ultra-low power and scalable optical connectivity solution optimized for intra-data center connectivity in the AI era.
Quantum-safe optical networking
Protect data from intrusion and theft through quantum-safe encryption, key management and intrusion detection
Networks that never stop working
Nokia is passionate about delivering the world’s highest-performing and most scalable, resilient, automated and trusted IP, optical and data center networks that connect you to your AI and cloud ambitions – within and across your data centers and clouds.
Building Europe’s Sovereign Digital Backbone: 23M, Xantaro and Nokia
CoreWeave delivers GPU cloud computing performance to move the AI era forward
Nscale's data center: AI innovation, performance, sustainability.
Frequently asked questions
Data center networking refers to the infrastructure that interconnects all components within one or more data centers, enabling compute, storage and application servers to communicate with each other, with external networks and with users. It includes intra-data center connections (within a single facility), inter-data center links (between sites), and connectivity to public and private clouds, the Internet and the wide area network (WAN). It involves the design, implementation and management of those connections.
Data center networks
Realize the full value of AI with data center networking solutions that meet the connectivity demands of AI and traditional application workloads.
AI is transforming data centers in two significant ways:
- Modernization - The growing demand for AI-driven applications and services is driving the need for data center modernization. This means designing and building infrastructure that can support the intense computational requirements of AI workloads. To meet these demands, data centers must adopt new architectures and technologies that can provide the necessary scalability, performance and flexibility.
- Optimization - AI is also being used to optimize and improve the operation of data centers themselves. By leveraging natural language processing, anomaly detection, predictive analytics and automation, data centers can be simpler to operate and become more efficient, reliable, responsive and sustainable.
A data center fabric is a network of leaf and spine switches that work together to provide a resilient and scalable infrastructure for connecting traditional and AI-based applications installed on GPU and/or CPU servers. Switching hardware provides the physical networking interfaces, switching matrix, control complex, fans and other physical components.
Each switch also runs network operating system (NOS) software that provides the intelligence, routing capabilities, telemetry and other programmable capabilities required to operate the switch. The network is typically managed by data center-fabric management and automation tools or platforms. The most modern approaches, like Nokia’s Event-Driven Automation (EDA) platform, provide advanced visibility and tooling that gives operators full visibility and minimizes human error while managing changes at will for infrastructures of any size and complexity.
Data Center Fabric
Bring new levels of reliability, simplicity and adaptability to your data center switching and cloud infrastructures.
A data center gateway is a carrier-grade router that is designed to handle advanced networking functions for connecting a data center fabric to the outside world. The data center gateway connects to the spine layer in a mesh topology in a way that’s similar to a leaf switch.
The Nokia Data Center Gateway enables you to provide high-performance connectivity between data centers, public clouds, the wide area network (WAN) and the internet. It supports a comprehensive set of use cases, including IP data center interconnect (DCI), internet peering and multi-cloud interconnection.
Data Center Gateway
Learn how the Nokia Data Center Gateway can help you optimize data center connectivity, performance, scalability and reliability.
Optical Data Center Interconnect (DCI) refers to optical networking technologies that interconnect data centers with ultra-high-speed, low-latency connectivity. Optical DCI utilizes dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) and the latest generation of coherent optical engines, optical line systems outfitted with pluggable optical modules and intelligent automation.
Optical Data Center Interconnect
Maximizing network infrastructure ROI in the era of AI.
Relentless demand for more capacity at a lower cost per bit is driving cloud builders to look for more efficient ways to scale their IP and optical network infrastructure. Recent advances in silicon technology and standardization have fueled the development of a new breed of profile-optimized Digital Coherent Optics (DCOs) that can be integrated in small pluggable form factors (such as QSFP56-DD. ZR and ZR+ pluggable DCOs) that give you the option to connect IP routers directly and efficiently over tunable DWDM wavelengths, with port densities similar to those you can achieve with short-reach client optics.
Coherent Routing
Simplify and transform your IP-optical network with IP over DWDM.
Quantum-safe networks are designed to be secure and trusted even against attacks from the threats posed by cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs). Quantum-safe networks use quantum-safe cryptography techniques that remain secure even in the presence of powerful quantum computers. Key ingredients of quantum-safe Networks are cryptographic keys, key distribution and network encryption.
While quantum computers are not yet commonplace, they soon will be. Critical infrastructures handling sensitive and private data face the risk of bad actors who stand to harvest data now to decrypt later once quantum computers are available. Nokia is paving the way for quantum-safe infrastructure with solutions available today to protect your AI and cloud network infrastructures (and data) now and into the future.
Quantum-safe optical networking
Protect data from intrusion and theft through quantum-safe encryption, key management and intrusion detection
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