Nokia, CSC – the Finnish IT Center for Science – and SURF have demonstrated a 1.2 Tbps quantum-safe optical data transfer between Amsterdam and Kajaani, Finland, to prepare for the next phase of AI and HPC development. Conducted in May 2025, the trial established a long-haul link across more than 3,500 kilometers of fiber, with one route extending to 4,700 km via Norway. The initiative is designed to support the LUMI-AI supercomputer and future AI Factories with ultra-high throughput and resilience.
The test involved transferring real and synthetic research data directly from disk to disk, spanning five national research and education networks: SURF (Netherlands), NORDUnet (Nordic backbone), Sunet (Sweden), SIKT (Norway), and Funet (Finland). The setup confirmed the capability of handling “elephant flows”—massive and continuous data streams essential for modern AI model training and simulation workloads. The network employed Nokia’s IP/MPLS routers with Flexible Ethernet (FlexE) and quantum-safe optical transport technology.
This infrastructure milestone ensures Europe’s readiness for data-intensive science, enabling applications such as transferring petabyte-scale climate datasets and training language models like GPT-nl on LUMI. The test also validated the feasibility of secure, long-distance multi-domain transfers—a critical requirement as cross-border collaboration and federated computing architectures evolve.
• Achieved over 1.2 Tbps data transfer across 3,500+ km fiber route
• Tested on production networks spanning 5 countries (NL, SE, NO, FI)
• Longest path tested was 4,700 km via Norway at 1 Tbps
• Used Nokia IP/MPLS with FlexE and quantum-safe optical gear
• Prepared for LUMI-AI and distributed AI Factory infrastructure
• Verified real-time disk-to-disk transfer of research datasets
“We design research networks with future needs in mind. CSC’s data center in Kajaani already hosts the pan-European LUMI supercomputer and with the upcoming LUMI-AI supercomputer and AI Factory coming online, reliable and scalable data connections throughout Europe are essential. Even though the geographical distance is significant, it poses no obstacle to data traffic.” — CSC
