- At an inflection point, Nokia readies new optical products
- Dell'Oro has noted that Nokia will move up to 2nd place in optical after closing on Infinera
- Recon's Daryl Schoolar expects more optical products from Nokia in 2025
Nokia is coming out swinging in the data center optical market. Less than a month after the Finnish vendor closed its $3.2 billion buyout of optical specialist Infinera, Nokia unveiled a slate of new products it said are designed to meet the needs of the AI era.
“It appears the Infinera integration with Nokia has gone well,” Recon Analytics analyst Daryl Schoolar told Fierce, noting the Infinera deal closed in late February. “We are roughly three weeks from Nokia closing the deal and Nokia is already announcing new optical solutions.”
Among other things, Nokia announced a new wavelength division multiplex optical line system that has been optimized for high-capacity data center interconnection and a new series of Muxponder and Transponder line cards for Nokia's modular transport platforms that use 400Gb/s and 800Gb/s pluggable coherent optics. These, as well as demos of its current lineup, will be showcased at the OFC conference in San Francisco later this month.
Market movement
We'll likely be hearing plenty more from Nokia on the optical front, with a focus on AI and data centers. Indeed, outgoing CEO Pekka Lundmark has identified data centers as a key growth target and the company said in its press release that AI workloads and other cloud-based services are "driving significant increases in data center capacity." These facilities, of course, require networking both between and within campuses.
Notably, incoming Nokia CEO Justin Hotard was an AI-focused Intel executive before the move. Hotard is scheduled to start as Nokia’s head on April 1.
“I expect to see more optical launches coming from Nokia given the background of its new CEO and the current demand to bring more bandwidth to data centers to support AI," Schoolar said.
Dell’Oro Group has previously said that Huawei is currently the top dog in the optical transport market. The combination of Nokia and Infinera, however, moves it into the number two slot across several geographic regions, according to Dell’Oro VP Jimmy Yu. The top five vendors in 2024 were Huawei, Ciena, Nokia, ZTE, and Infinera, according to the latest Dell’Oro report.
Dell'Oro VP Sameh Boujelbene recently told Fierce Nokia is also expected to move up the ranks in the AI data center back-end network market.
"The market is currently dominated by InfiniBand (Nvidia) at nearly 60%. However, Ethernet is gaining traction quiet rapidly," she said last month. "As of 2024, Celestica, Huawei and NVIDIA (with their spectrum X) dominated the Ethernet segment of the AI back-end network market. However, the competitive landscape is set to evolve in 2025, with Accton, Arista, Cisco, Juniper, Nokia, and other vendors expected to gain ground."