Digital infrastructure across Latin America and Southeast Asia (SEA) adopted various Ciena solutions in capacity plays for increasing AI-driven workload pressures.

The first update concerns the Matrix Cable System (MCS), the 1,055-kilometer route linking Indonesia with Singapore, which is operated by Matrix Networks and PT NAP Info Lintas Nusa (Matrix NAP Info). The Batam–Jakarta segment gained Ciena's GeoMesh Extreme solution, which incorporates the WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e) coherent optics solution, and now supports 1 Tb/s per wavelength.

Director of Matrix NAP Info Omar Syarif Nasution said the venture future-proofs Indonesia’s international connectivity backbone while ensuring "customers have access to the bandwidth they need to compete in the AI and cloud era."

"We are proud to be among the first operators in Southeast Asia to reach this milestone on a live submarine system,” Nasution added.

The Indonesia expansion follows ventures in the wider region with Vietnam's Viettel and a SEA-US route with Trans Pacific Networks (TPN).

Argentinian vendor Cirion Technologies launched a network-as-a-service (NaaS) solution leveraging Ciena wares. These include Ciena’s Waveserver optical platform, 6500 reconfigurable line system (RLS), and 8110 and 8114 Coherent Aggregation Router and switching products.

Denver-based Carma developed and integrated API‑based interfaces between Cirion’s digital service platform and Ciena's Navigator Network Control Suite automation platform, facilitating automated provisioning of wavelength services across Cirion’s fiber and subsea footprint. This footprint serves more than 6,200 enterprise, government, hyperscaler, carrier, and data center customers across Latin America, with a fiber network backbone of more than 105,000 kilometers.

Wavelength services are the first product enabled through Cirion's new NaaS framework, with additional IP and transport services scheduled to follow. The service touts a layer of operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS), enabling service orchestration, commercial management, billing, and a digital customer experience.

Ciena trumpeted Markets and Markets research that Latin America's cloud market is expected to grow from $63 billion in 2025 to $125 billion in 2030. This was put down to agentic AI, with the example of agents communicating between Bogotá and São Paulo needing a circuit that can be established instantly and released upon task completion.

"Cirion is turning its network into a programmable platform – connectivity that can be activated and scaled like a cloud service, not a traditional engineering project,” Fernando Capella, regional director for Central America and Latin America (CALA) South at Ciena, noted in a statement. “Automation is essential to evolving static networks into dynamic ecosystems capable of responding quickly to new demands for capacity, cloud connectivity, and artificial intelligence. This is exactly what Latin America’s digital economy needs.”

Ciena CEO Gary Smith in a recent interview with SDxCentral said Ciena’s optics-based inside-the-data-center play is “really the only technology” capable of enabling distances and volumes needed for the immense buildout required by surging AI workloads.

“You saw it on the outside of the data center over the last 20, 30 years. It's moved from electrical to optical," Smith said. "Ciena's been a massive beneficiary of that. We see the same dynamic happening inside the data center over time now. And so these investments that people like Nvidia have made in the optical ecosystem, frankly, validate that hypothesis.”