Europe clears Nokia’s $2.3bn Infinera AI takeover at the last minute
The European Commission has approved the $2.3bn acquisition by Nokia of US competitor Infinera by Nokia in the nick of time.
The deal, which Infinera expects to complete tomorrow, creates an optical networking business with a turnover of over $3.6bn. Both Nokia and Infinera supply optical transport equipment used to transmit data through optical fibre cables.
The deal takes Nokia into the fast growing AI data centre market. The company sold off its submarine cable business acquired with Alcatel to the French state in January and the new cEO comes from Intel’s AI business.
Infinera has an optical semiconductor fab in Sunnyvale, California, using indium phosphide (InP) for photonic ICs (PICs) that integrate tuneable lasers, optical amplifiers, high-speed modulators and detectors, and other functions onto a single chip to deliver leading-edge coherent optical transceivers.
These devices have been used by US operator Zayo in a live network trial completed last week with using Infinera’s ICE7 seventh-generation embedded optical engine. This provided 1 Tbit/s single 150GHz wavelength transmission over a 1,391km link and will enable Zayo to deliver a 32 terabits of C-Band capacity from Sacramento in California to Salt Lake City in Utah with the ability to double bandwidth to 64 terabits with L-Band.
The ICE7 optical engine uses a 5nm CMOS DSP with high-speed optics to deliver 140+ Gbaud and single-wavelength transmission of up to 1.2 Tb/s.
Zayo operates the largest independent network, spanning 132,000 route miles in North America alone, and one of the largest and most modern 400G networks in North America. Nokia already supplies operators such as AT&T and T-mobile.
“We believe now is the right time to take a compelling inorganic step to further expand Nokia’s scale in optical networks. The combined businesses have a strong strategic fit given their highly complementary customer, geographic and technology profiles,” noted Pekka Lundmark, president and CEO of Nokia.
“The success of this trial marks a major accomplishment for Infinera as it underscores the power of ICE7’s ability to transmit 1 Tb/s high-baud-rate signals across a significant distance, which will be instrumental in driving down network operator costs while meeting the rapidly growing bandwidth demands of their customers,” said Paul Crann, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Optical Systems, at Infinera.
“The transaction will allow the merged entity to attain the requisite scale in its optical networking business to accelerate its product roadmap and compete more vigorously with larger competitors in the market,” said the Commission.
The Commission investigated the impact of the transaction on the global or EEA markets for the supply of optical transport equipment, as well as on the narrower segments of such markets based on the type/application of the equipment and found that the combined market shares in the global or European markets for the supply of optical transport equipment, as well as on the narrower segments of such markets, are moderate. It also found that there are several credible competitors on those markets.
www.nokia.com; www.infinera.com
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