ANTONY SAVVAS DATA CENTRE INFRASTRUCTURE
OPTICAL SCALES FOR AI-FOCUSED HIGH-CAPACITY DATA CENTRES
With the needs of AI now driving new data centre infrastructure build outs, the optical interconnectivity technology to support the changing market has to evolve. Technology journalist Antony Savvas looks at the latest developments.
“We raised our full year 2026 forecast from 10% to 16% following standout results in the first quarter of 2026,” says Jimmy Yu, vice president at Dell’Oro Group. “We estimate the optical transport market grew 20% year-over-year in the first quarter of this year, driven by demand for data centre interconnect. However, many key optical suppliers are noting a growing backlog of orders as lead times continue to stretch out. We think supply may be the biggest factor keeping the optical transport market’s growth rate from being even higher this year due to all the AI data centre build- outs,” says Yu.
for higher throughput and lower latency interconnection. Ed d’Agostino, vice president at DE-CIX North America, says: “Our upgrades are about building and reinforcing reliability at scale. With our 4-node architecture spanning New York and New Jersey, and readiness for higher-capacity services, we’re building for how networks are actually evolving: more distributed, more performance-driven, and with greater degrees of visibility and control than ever before.” SUBSEA Lightstorm, a cloud and AI network infrastructure platform delivering high-performance terrestrial and subsea connectivity across the Asia- Pacific region, recently announced the successful quadrupling of client service capacity for its Japan–Guam–Australia (JGA) submarine cable system. JGA is the newest, low-latency subsea cable system connecting Tokyo to Sydney, delivering an advanced Pacific route optimised for cloud, AI, and data- intensive workloads. Powered by Ciena’s WaveLogic coherent optical technology, the move from 100Gbps to 400Gbps client traffic represents a significant increase in efficiency, scalability, and economics for customers supporting hyperscale cloud services, AI training and inference workloads, content distribution, and latency-sensitive enterprise applications. “Upgrading JGA to 400Gbps client traffic is a major milestone to us, delivering AI-ready, cloud-optimised connectivity across the Pacific,” says Amajit Gupta, Lightstorm group CEO and managing director. “As the newest and lowest-latency cable between Tokyo and Sydney, JGA provides a powerful foundation to support cloud and AI architectures.” “Subsea operators like Lightstorm require scalable, high-performance
optical solutions to meet surging cloud and AI bandwidth demands,” adds Amit Malik, vice president and general manager, Asia-Pacific, Japan and India, for Ciena. “With WaveLogic coherent optics, Lightstorm is transforming JGA into a platform capable of delivering 400G services today and to seamlessly scale to 800G services in the near future.” MOBILE EDGE GPU RAN (or AI-RAN) integrates graphics processing units into telecoms networks to process Radio Access Network (RAN) baseband workloads. By relying on massively parallel processing, it replaces traditional purpose-built hardware, allowing operators to run both standard 5G data traffic and edge AI applications on the same shared, programmable infrastructure. Instead of dedicating separate servers strictly to network traffic and separate ones for AI, operators can use shared GPU clusters to monetise the network edge. According to Dell’Oro Group, cumulative AI-RAN revenue is projected to reach $35 billion over the next five years (2026-2030). “AI-RAN is already happening and will scale ahead of 6G. These tools will enhance the RAN,” says Stefan Pongratz, vice president at Dell’Oro Group. He says AI- RAN is expected to become “an important technology enabler” as operators incorporate greater virtualisation, intelligence, and automation into their RAN roadmaps. Amdocs, the provider of software and services to communications service providers (CSPs), has completed a live AI-RAN field-validated blueprint in collaboration with 1Finity, a Fujitsu company, and Supermicro. The deployment showcased next- generation Open vRAN architecture, running 1Finity Open vRAN software on Supermicro ARM-based 1U servers, equipped with NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips and Red Hat
ADDRESSING AI DEMAND As traffic patterns evolve and AI
workloads demand more distributed infrastructure, DE-CIX has upgraded its New York metro platform to a quad- node network architecture, with two core nodes in New York and two in New Jersey. The design delivers higher redundancy, greater resilience, and enables true A/B connectivity strategies across the Hudson River. The upgraded architecture reflects the growing importance of New Jersey as a natural extension of the New York metro’s digital infrastructure. By operating 2-node cores on each side of the Hudson, DE-CIX enables customers to build geographically separated yet tightly integrated interconnection strategies. This supports enterprises, carriers, cloud providers, and AI-driven platforms seeking greater operational control, improved business continuity, and infrastructure diversity. As traffic shifts toward higher-capacity services, DE-CIX’s platform has been upgraded to support growing demand for 400 Gigabit Ethernet ports. It says the rise of GPU-intensive and AI- driven workloads, alongside content distribution and large-scale cloud connectivity, is accelerating the need
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| ISSUE 44 | Q3 2026
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