Midgard Infra offers terabit-class capacity to and from the Nordics as a managed, consumption-based service — a sign of how quickly frontier optical performance is becoming standardised infrastructure.
Stavanger, Norway — 28 May 2026 — Artificial intelligence is changing not only how much data the world moves, but where it has to move it. As AI models grow past the power and space limits of any single building, training and inference are spreading across multiple data centres and regions, and the high-capacity optical links between them are turning from a specialist engineering project into a service that can simply be purchased. Midgard Infra’s Managed Optical Fiber Network (MOFN) is one example of that shift: terabit-class connectivity to and from the Nordics, delivered as a managed, consumption-based service.
A global survey by optical networking vendor Ciena found that 43 percent of new data centre facilities are expected to be dedicated specifically to AI workloads. Those workloads routinely exceed the power and space of a single facility, forcing operators to distribute training clusters across sites and connect them with ultra-low-latency networks. The network between data centres, long treated as plumbing, has become part of the compute architecture itself.
“For years, terabit optical transport was something you set records with. Now it is becoming something you order,” said Luke Fox, Chief Commercial Officer of Midgard Infra. “The terabit era is moving from the press release to the purchase order. The interesting question is no longer whether this capacity is technically possible, it is how quickly it can become ordinary, available infrastructure for the companies that need it.”
Until recently, buyers of high-capacity connectivity faced two extremes: own dark fibre outright — a heavy capital commitment that effectively means taking a whole cable, and its engineering burden, with it — or accept the limits of standard wavelength services. The middle option, terabit capacity bought flexibly and managed by someone else, is what has been missing.
MOFN is built to bridge the gap between ownership and flexibility. It provides dedicated, high-capacity optical transport that scales into the multi-terabit range, billed as an operating expense rather than a capital project, with Midgard Infra designing, deploying and monitoring the optical layer so customers do not need optical engineers of their own. The service runs on Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 coherent optics, the same generation of technology Midgard Infra has demonstrated at 1.6 Tb/s on an in-service subsea cable between Norway and the United Kingdom. What is changing is not the underlying capability, but its packaging: from a bespoke infrastructure build to a standardised service.
“This is built for the neo-scalers, the AI and cloud providers, and the multi-site enterprises establishing a presence in Northern Europe,” said Fox. “They need the performance of owned infrastructure without the cost, the lead time, or the specialist teams. We handle the physics; they get capacity they can scale up or down as their workloads dictate.”