Ciena reached an agreement to acquire optical technology developer Nubis Communications.

It will acquire the New Providence, New Jersey-based firm in an all-cash deal worth $270 million. The acquisition is expected to close in Ciena’s fiscal fourth quarter 2025.

Nubis’ solutions are set to complement Ciena’s existing high-speed interconnects offerings, furthering the firm’s efforts to capture data center demand.

“The acquisition of Nubis represents a significant step forward in Ciena’s strategy to address the rapidly growing demand for scalable, high-performance connectivity inside the data center, driven by the explosive growth of AI-related traffic,” said Ciena chief strategy officer David Rothenstein.

Who are Nubis Communications?

Nubis was founded in 2020 by Peter Winzer, who previously spent more than a decade at Nokia Bell Labs, where he led its fiber-optic transmission research.

It counts the likes of Ericsson’s venture capital arm among its investors, having worked with the Swedish giant to test co-packaged optics for use in next-generation radio access network (RAN) deployments. Other investors include Groq backers TDK Ventures and Matrix Partners, which was an early-stage investor in Apple and Xilinx.

Nubis develops high-performance, ultra-compact, low-power optical and electrical interconnects capable of “breaking the I/O wall in data centers.”

Ciena plans to integrate Nubis's high-density photonic modules, which offer up to 6.4 Tb/s full-duplex bandwidth, with its own SerDes (serializer/deserializer) offerings.

Nubis’ Active Copper Cables (ACC) use advanced analog electronics for high-speed data transmission, enabling 200 Gb/s per lane up to four meters. According to Ciena, this offering will support more AI accelerators across racks, overcoming limitations of traditional copper or digital signal processor-based solutions.

“With ownership of these key technologies for a wider range of use cases inside the data center, we are expanding our competitive advantage by advancing development of differentiated solutions, reducing development costs, and driving long-term efficiency and profitability,” Rothenstein added.

The acquisition will see more than 50 Nubis engineers join Ciena’s R&D team.

“Together, we will advance Ciena's data center strategy by delivering reliable, high-quality, and high-performance interconnect solutions to support the next generation of AI workloads,” Nubis CEO Dan Harding claimed.