data-center-interconnect
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Ciena’s AI opportunity runs through old fiber
The company that helped telephone carriers squeeze more from their cables is selling the same economic idea to the AI era. The speeds have changed. The appeal of avoiding another dig has not.
The Cloud Has an API. Console Connect Wants the Network to Have One Too.
Console Connect puts a cloud-style control panel on PCCW Global's private backbone. The result is a network you can order in clicks - provided the fibre, ports and last mile are already where you need them.
The Tiny Box Carrying AI's Biggest Traffic Jam
InnoLight makes the pack-of-gum-sized optical modules that let AI clusters talk at 800 gigabits and beyond. Its real product is not light alone, but a practical escape route from bandwidth, heat and power constraints.
The Company That Rents the Internet Its Roads - and Just Bought the Traffic Back
Uniti spent a decade as the landlord of a fiber empire. In 2025 it bought its biggest tenant back, and set out to sell strands of glass to the companies building the AI internet.
Megaport
Megaport is an Australian network-as-a-service company that lets enterprises spin up private, high-speed connections between data centers and the major public clouds in minutes rather than months. Through a software-defined network spanning more than 1,100 enabled data centers across some 30 countries, Megaport replaces the fixed contracts and manual provisioning of traditional telecom with on-demand, elastic bandwidth billed by the hour. Its platform - centered on Virtual Cross Connects, the Megaport Cloud Router and Megaport Virtual Edge - connects over 4,000 customers to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle and hundreds of other providers. Listed on the ASX as MP1, the company is now extending from connectivity into compute as it builds toward a globally distributed AI inference cloud.
AttoTude
AttoTude is a Menlo Park, California deep-tech startup building the world's first THz (terahertz) radio over wire - an interconnect platform that moves data between AI servers and GPUs at hundreds of gigabits per second over standard wire, without photonics or exotic packaging. Founded in 2024 by optical-networking veteran Dave Welch and RF/semiconductor pioneer Joy Laskar, the company adapts fiber-grade signaling to terahertz frequencies on low-cost ASICs to break the bandwidth, power, and reliability bottlenecks choking AI data centers. It came out of stealth at OFC 2025 and has raised roughly $91M total, including a $50M Series B led by Mayfield.