As AI adoption explodes, neoscalers are rapidly building out their compute environments—massive clusters of GPUs and specialized infrastructure designed to train and deploy increasingly complex models. But GPUs alone aren’t enough. To deliver AI services at scale, these compute systems must be connected to each other, to cloud and colocation sites, and to the end users and applications they support.
That connectivity requires the right network. Designing, deploying, and operating these networks is not typically a neoscaler’s core competence. Yet without these networks, AI services can’t go live. Simplifying this part of the infrastructure is essential to turning AI investment into real-world value.
What neoscalers need from the network
Neoscalers face intense pressure to quickly launch services while still delivering exceptional performance and reliability. To deliver the best possible experience to their customers, they must be able to:
- Accelerate service delivery with infrastructure that can be deployed quickly
- Ensure guaranteed service quality through predictable, high-performing connections
- Reduce operating costs with space-, power-, and staffing-efficient transport
- Sustain customer satisfaction with connectivity that remains fast, consistent, and reliable as needs evolve
Meeting these expectations requires a global AI network fabric built on optical connectivity that delivers unsurpassed network speeds, ultra-low latency, and zero-trust resilience. To keep pace with dynamic market growth, neoscalers need a way to establish this connectivity quickly, reliably, and without diverting resources away from their core mission: delivering massive GPU clusters and LLM platforms at scale.
Closing the optical networking skills gap
Neoscalers excel at compute, but some do not have in-house teams experienced in designing, engineering, and deploying optical networks at scale. They also don’t typically have the specialized tools, architectural knowledge, or operational models needed to efficiently build and run these networks.
Ciena addresses this gap by providing the high-performance optical infrastructure—and the expertise to plan, deploy, and operate it—that ties distributed AI compute clusters together. They are the experts of AI networking, ensuring the data can flow wherever the compute is.
Drawing from decades of experience designing and deploying optical fiber networks, Ciena offers a flexible approach to building neoscaler networks, from pre-deployment preparation through network build.
Pre-deployment preparation ensures the network infrastructure is ready for a successful optical deployment. This includes fiber characterization, on-site surveys and infrastructure readiness, staging, and logistics support—enabling Ciena’s experts to identify and mitigate risks early so network builds stay on schedule.
Network build starts with solution design to establish technology requirements and proceeds through deployment and turn-up and test. With flexible network and service provisioning options, neoscalers can align tasks with their available skills and staff.
Ciena’s Project Management Professional (PMP)®1 certified project managers achieve a 97% on-time service delivery rate across more than 5,000 implementation projects annually. Through optimized service delivery processes, Ciena Services reduces risk, optimizes costs, and minimizes traffic impacts while ensuring that network builds are delivered on time and on budget.
Operating optical networks for sustained AI performance
Once the network is live, ongoing operations become critical. Meeting strict SLAs, supporting unpredictable AI traffic patterns, and maintaining continuous uptime all require specialized operational expertise. Ciena has decades of network operations experience and provides flexible options that let neoscalers choose how much they want to manage—and how much they want Ciena to handle.
Ciena’s secure, multi-vendor, geo-diverse network operations center (NOC) monitors and manages incidents and problems, including coordination with multiple fiber network providers. Ciena engineers provide robust, around-the-clock technical support to ensure continuous and reliable operations. To further maintain high availability, a Ciena engineer can be embedded with the neoscaler’s operations team to deliver expert troubleshooting, issue identification, and escalation for all infrastructure. To maximize uptime, same-day spare delivery and installation—supported by full logistics coordination and a dedicated project manager—ensure repairs and replacements are quickly and accurately completed.
With the optical network simplified and running efficiently through Ciena expertise and solutions and professional services, neoscalers can concentrate on what matters most:delivering massive GPU clusters and LLM platforms that accelerate AI-optimized service delivery and new and emerging AI application.
1 Project Management Professional (PMP)® is a registered mark of Project Management Institute, Inc.