Infinera
More info
- Creator
- Jagdeep Singh, Drew Perkins, Dave Welch
- Released
- 2000–2025
- Owner
- Nokia (from 2025)
- Type
- Optical networking equipment
The optics company that squeezed a rack's worth of lasers and modulators onto a single indium phosphide chip.
Founded in Sunnyvale in 2000, at the height of the telecom bubble, around an idea most of the industry considered too hard: photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Instead of building every wavelength from discrete parts, Infinera put dozens of lasers, modulators and detectors on one chip. The result was fiber transport gear that was cheaper to scale and easier to run.
Its customers were carriers and cloud giants pushing terabits between data centers and across oceans. The competition was Ciena, Huawei and Nokia – and in 2025 Nokia settled the matter by buying Infinera outright.