How is Nokia Boosting AI Data Centre Networking Capacity?

Nokia has announced an expansion of its data centre networking portfolio to meet the growing performance and scalability demands of AI workloads. 

The company unveiled its 7220 Interconnect Router (IXR) family of high-performance data centre switches and new AI-enabled automation tools for its Event-Driven Automation (EDA) platform.

The updates are designed to help data centres manage the massive data throughput required by AI training and inference workloads, while improving efficiency and uptime through automation.

Scaling for AI-driven performance

The rapid rise of agentic AI applications has intensified demand for high-capacity networking infrastructure capable of handling increasingly complex workloads.

Nokia’s 7220 IXR-H6 switches deliver up to 102.4 Tb/s throughput with interface speeds of 800 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) and 1.6 Terabit Ethernet (TE) – doubling throughput and interface performance compared to previous models.

The switches comply with Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) specifications, providing advanced congestion management and packet flow optimisation for large-scale AI data centres, including “AI factories” that can scale to more than one million XPUs.

Nokia’s latest switches also offer deployment flexibility with both liquid-cooled and air-cooled options. They support multiple rack configurations, ensuring easy integration into a variety of data centre environments.

In a market where interoperability is increasingly critical, Nokia remains the only vendor to offer switches compatible with both its SR Linux Network Operating System (NOS) and the open-source Community SONiC. This gives data centre operators greater flexibility and confidence to choose the right software to match their infrastructure needs.

“Our partnership with Nokia continues to deliver meaningful operating advantages amid the accelerating pace of AI innovation,” says Tom Burke, Chief Revenue Officer at Nscale. 

“With Nokia’s technology, Nscale strengthens its ability to deliver for our shared customers. This announcement further extends Nokia’s leadership, and reinforces our confidence that, together, we’re best serving the needs of customers who rely on advanced AI technology.”

Enhancing automation and reliability

As data centre environments become increasingly complex, automation and AIOps are central to maintaining performance and resilience. Nokia’s enhanced EDA platform introduces agentic AI capabilities that combine natural language processing with reasoning tools to identify and resolve issues more efficiently.

EDA AIOps enables fast and accurate detection, root cause analysis and remediation across network operations. When combined with real-time telemetry, integrated digital twins, dry-run testing and instant roll-back features, the system allows operators to act confidently and minimise service disruption.

According to Bell Labs Consulting and Futurum’s Data Centre Fabric Reliability Study, organisations using Nokia’s EDA AIOps can achieve up to a 96% reduction in data centre network downtime.

“The 1.6 TE interface speeds on Nokia’s new family of 7220 IXR switches hit a sweet spot in the market as agentic AI compels a change in data centre networking requirements,” explains Alan Weckel, Founder and Technology Analyst at 650 Group. 

“Agentic AI-powered AIOps on Nokia’s EDA platform is timely, driving increased operational efficiency and reliability in a demanding network environment. Also great to see Nokia’s commitment to the UEC as 650 Group analysis projects Ethernet will be the dominant networking protocol for AI moving forward.”

Preparing for the AI super-cycle

As AI adoption accelerates, the pressure on data centre infrastructure to deliver higher performance with minimal downtime continues to mount. Nokia’s focus on scalability, openness and automation reflects the evolving needs of cloud and enterprise customers deploying increasingly complex AI systems.

Vach Kompella, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Nokia’s IP Networks business, says: “The astonishing growth in AI adoption has led to a dramatic overhaul in how data centres operate, and is driving constant evolution in hardware and operational tools. 

“We are pleased to announce our new family of high-performance 7220 IXR-H6 switches along with advances in our EDA platform, which now leverages the sophistication of agentic AI to drive highly reliable network operations at the speed required to keep up with the pace of change. 

“Today marks one of many milestones for Nokia’s data centre networking portfolio, and we look forward to bringing even more technology innovation to our global customer base to support the AI super-cycle.”

With its new products, Nokia positions itself to address the dual challenge of AI-era networking – scaling data centre capacity while maintaining operational reliability through intelligent automation.