The Iberian Peninsula is fast becoming a major connectivity hub linking Europe to the world. Ciena Iberia’s José Eduardo Gonçalves explains how we’re supporting the region’s growth with next-gen optical technologies.

For anyone working in telecommunications, Portugal and Spain are great places to be right now. Once peripheral to the Frankfurt-London-Amsterdam-Paris circuit, the Iberian Peninsula is now at the epicenter of a new wave of global connectivity.

As the dynamics of the AI economy drive up demand for speed, capacity, and compute power, regions like Aragon, Madrid, Cataluña, and Alentejo are finding innovative ways to respond, attracting investment from major hyperscalers and data center operators.

It’s a dynamic that Ciena is pleased to be supporting, with our next-generation optical technologies like WaveLogic 6 and WaveLogic 6e already pushing the capabilities of fiber to an unprecedented 1.6Tb/s.

New leadership for Ciena Iberia

Excited about the innovation happening in Spain and Portugal, I’ve recently moved from Brazil to head the Ciena Iberia team, dedicated to helping operators, service providers, and investors in the region to achieve their growth ambitions.

I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce Ciena Iberia and discuss some of the exciting developments we’re seeing in the region.

Sol and Medusa: New subsea routes connecting continents

First—subsea network connectivity. Google has recently announced its new Sol cable, connecting Florida with the Google Cloud region in Madrid via Bermuda and the Azores. Medusa, meanwhile, is poised to play a key role in the economic expansion across the Mediterranean Sea and build on Portugal’s direct link to West Africa via the existing Equiano cable.

These new subsea cables won’t just open intercontinental routes for industry players investing in Spain and Portugal; they’ll also offer new diversity options between the two countries, increasing resiliency in an age where uninterrupted high-speed, high-capacity connectivity has become a fundamental expectation. And as demand for AI soars, the new routes will support the expansion of AI infrastructure and services in the Iberian Peninsula.

Sines and Aragon: New hotspots for data center infrastructure

Speaking of which, some of the most exciting developments in the region are happening in the data center world. Sines in Portugal is one city that’s capitalizing on new intercontinental subsea network connections to become a next-generation data center hub.

The emerging AI boom will need hyperscale data centers with unprecedented demand for power, space, and cooling. Environmental impact is a key concern, but Sines is showing how it can be done in a low-impact way, with its 1.2 GW Start Campus data center using 100% renewable energy as well as seawater-based cooling systems.

The town’s proximity to transatlantic cables like EllaLink, Equiano, Medusa and Nuvem, as well as at least 12 terrestrial backbone routes into continental Europe, will make Sines an attractive location for hyperscalers and data center operators.

Another region capitalizing on the digital infrastructure boom is Aragon in Spain, where hyperscalers Microsoft and AWS, among others, have been investing heavily in their cloud data center footprint. Research by FDi Intelligence shows Aragon poised to overtake Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin, and Madrid by 2030 in terms of installed data center capacity, making it third only to London and Frankfurt.

Green energy is a key focus here too, with 89% of Aragon’s electricity coming from renewable sources in 2024. Water-minimizing cooling technologies are also being pioneered at data centers like Azora’s new €2bn Zaragoza site. And while Aragon is landlocked, it’s well positioned between subsea cable landing points in Bilbao and Barcelona, and close to the major terrestrial network hub of Madrid.

Ciena Iberia is ready to support national and regional ambitions

The Iberian Peninsula’s role as a global cloud and AI hub depends heavily on connectivity. Subsea cables are critical, but so is terrestrial infrastructure—linking data centers to subsea routes, metro, transport, wireless networks, peering hubs, and edge locations. This creates opportunities across the ecosystem, from hyperscalers to service providers.

Ciena’s portfolio is built to support Spain and Portugal’s transformation with technologies that deliver performance, resilience, and scalability, including:

  • 6500 Family of Packet-Optical Platforms: Provides scalable network connectivity with industry-leading technology innovations and flexible shelf configurations to optimize space and power to your site specific requirements.
  • 6500 Reconfigurable Line System (RLS): Offers highly dense ROADM and amplifier configurations with more flexibility and programmability so that you can easily scale and adapt to changing traffic demands.
  • Waveserver: Compact modular transport platforms that provide massive scalability to meet the surging capacity needs of high-growth, bandwidth-intensive applications across metro, long-haul, and submarine networks .
  • Routing and switching portfolio: Offers the agility and scale needed for access, aggregation, edge, and core networks, supporting multiple use cases such as mobile transport, multi-cloud connectivity, and IP/Optical convergence.
  • Navigator Network Control Suite (NCS): Ciena’s software that provides comprehensive visibility of your multi-layer, multi-vendor network from one point of control, with integrated AI-driven insights—so you can accelerate and automate network operations with confidence.

The Ciena Iberia team is here and ready to support the regional, national, and international ambitions of every player in Spain and Portugal. We look forward to discussing your connectivity challenges and finding solutions that fit your needs.

If you have a challenge you’d like to discuss, please get in touch.