Nokia has paired with European hosting provider Hetzner to upgrade the company’s data center and core network infrastructure.

It’s the latest data center-focused partnership announced by Nokia in recent months.

According to Nokia, the upgrades will provide Hetzner the opportunity to “scale efficiently, improve automation, and maintain industry-leading uptime.”

Founded in 1997, German IT company Hetzner operates several thousand servers in energy-efficient data center parks in Nuremberg and Falkenstein in Germany, plus Helsinki, Finland. The company has also expanded its infrastructure to Singapore and the US.

The deployment is already live in Germany and Finland, ahead of plans to expand to other European markets to meet increasing digital infrastructure demands.

Nokia is providing its energy-efficient routers, automation, and telemetry to Hetzner to support next-generation workloads.

“Through close collaboration with Nokia, we have been able to integrate new technology effectively into our system,” said Martin Fritzsche, head of network at Hetzner.

“This has ensured we remain flexible and agile whilst improving our data centers to meet our customer’s needs. Whether it is higher bandwidth, improved network availability, or optimized energy efficiency.”

The vendor has provided its 7750 SR-1x routers, which it says are designed for carrier-grade reliability, power efficiency, and scalability. Nokia notes that Hetzner is able to use single-lambda 100G transceivers, while the architecture is future-proofed to support 400G and 800G interconnectivity.

“This deployment shows our shared commitment to innovation, resilience, and sustainability in data center networking,” added Matthieu Bourguignon, senior vice president for Network Infrastructure Europe, Nokia.

Nokia’s data center push continues

Nokia has banged the drum hard on its data center focus in the last year.

Last month, Nokia appointed Intel data center executive Justin Hotard as its CEO to replace Pekka Lundmark, who is stepping down.

Prior to this, Lundmark said in October that Nokia sees a “significant opportunity” to expand its presence in the data center market.

Following his comments, Nokia extended its existing agreement to supply Microsoft Azure with data center routers and switches. Then in December, Nokia along with Kyndryl announced plans to offer advanced data center networking solutions and services to global enterprises.

In September, Nokia also announced the launch of a data center automation platform, which it describes as an “event-driven automation” (EDA) platform.

During this year’s Mobile World Congress, Subho Mukherjee, vice president & global head of sustainability told DCD that “AI has been a once-in-a-generation catalyst for data center boom.”