Ciena Drives Sustainable Network Transformation in UAE and Saudi Arabia Amidst AI Surge
Ciena is accelerating sustainable innovation and circular practices within its operations and supply chain to support the growing demand for high-performing, low-carbon networks in the Middle East. This initiative aligns with the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s Net Zero targets and Vision 2030 goals, particularly as AI applications and network traffic surge.
Ciena’s latest Sustainability Report highlights innovations designed to help network operators reduce energy consumption, waste, and material use, all while meeting increasing network capacity and performance demands. These efforts contribute significantly to global and regional climate change initiatives.
The Middle East is rapidly becoming a data center powerhouse. James Crawshaw, practice leader at Omdia, noted that leading hyperscale and cloud providers have pledged over $10 billion this year alone for data center build-outs in Saudi Arabia to securely store content, run workloads, and offer higher speeds. Both the UAE and KSA are accelerating their ambitions in this sector , with local data centers in Ajman and Abu Dhabi also supporting burgeoning AI workloads. These developments necessitate sustainable network scaling to meet the demands of AI data center hubs.
Virginie Hollebecque, Vice President and Leader of Europe, Middle East and Africa at Ciena, emphasized Ciena’s role in this evolution, saying, “Ciena is at the forefront of creating modern architectures and implementing network optimizations to ensure our customers can maintain peak capacity and support evolving connectivity needs”. She added, “As both the UAE and KSA accelerate their sustainability ambitions in line with global standards, Ciena is committed to meeting capacity demands while minimizing environmental impact. We are working with network operators to optimize optical network infrastructure and strategically support the evolution of AI data center hubs”.
A key innovation, Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e), reduces power consumption per bit by 54%, enabling operators to scale sustainably. Earlier this year, e& UAE deployed WL6e on its optical network, boosting it with ultra-high-speed 400G client infrastructure connectivity and supporting 10 Gb home services, along with wholesale and domestic business customer traffic with 100G and 400G requirements.
