STOCKHOLM - Nokia's bid to buy U.S. optical networking gear maker Infinera in a $2.3 billion deal puts the Finnish company on track to gain from the billions of dollars in investment pouring into data centres to cater to the rise of artificial intelligence.
"This is pretty optimal timing for a deal of this nature when you are timing it just before the market is expected to start to recover," Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark said in an interview with Reuters. Infinera is especially strong in intra data centre communications, which refers to server-to-server communications inside data centers. This will be one of the fastest growing segments in the overall communications technology market, Lundmark said.
Infinera gets about 60% of its business from the United States, while Nokia had a bigger share in Europe and Asia, making it a complementary transaction, said Lundmark.