The increase in usage of wide area networks, or WANs, inside data centers, is a positive for Cisco (CSCO), Ciena (CIEN) and Nokia (NOK), investment firm BNP Paribas said.
“We expect frontier model training to increasingly rely on distributed, regional AI infrastructure as hyperscalers build gigawatt-scale data center campuses,” analyst Karl Ackerman wrote in a note to clients. “This is meant to circumvent the power limitations and cycle time construction and deployment of AI infrastructure in a single location. Thus, gigawatt-scale data centers must be constructed in multiple locations in parallel and use WAN to connect them together. This is positive for optical transport suppliers like Ciena, Cisco, and Nokia.”
Ackerman, who went to the Supercomputing 2025 conference, also said the usage of UALink should continue, as it is seen as a “viable alternative” to Ethernet and NVLink, with AMD (AMD) continuing to support an “open ecosystem for scale-up.”
