en.Wedoany.com Reported - Lumen Technologies has completed the acquisition of cloud networking platform Alkira. Alkira's on-demand network platform helps enterprises quickly establish connections between clouds, sites, partners, and AI workloads. By combining Alkira's technology with Lumen's physical infrastructure, programmable network, and partner ecosystem, Lumen aims to simplify how enterprises build and manage networks.
This acquisition enables Lumen to integrate its physical network foundation with an on-demand platform, accelerating the delivery of a more programmable and AI-adapted network experience. The integration solidifies Lumen's position as an AI network provider and expands the network, cloud, security, and AI services customers need to support more agile operations. For enterprise customers, this means a simpler way to manage increasingly complex infrastructure with the flexibility to choose the services and capabilities they require. Through a single programmable network, enterprises can implement consistent security policies, gain better visibility and monitoring capabilities, and reduce manual operations and resource provisioning delays. In the future, deeper integration with Lumen's connectivity services will help customers extend these benefits to more technology domains.
"AI is reshaping how enterprises operate, driving unprecedented demand for intelligent, programmable networks that can securely and seamlessly transport data across cloud, edge, and data center environments," said Kate Johnson, CEO of Lumen. "By bringing Alkira into Lumen, we combine world-class network infrastructure with cloud networking innovation to help customers simplify complexity. This is an important step in the company's transformation, enhancing our ability to help customers build, scale, and operate in the AI era."
This acquisition strengthens Lumen's ability to support cloud connectivity and the rapidly growing data transfer between clouds, data centers, and AI infrastructure. As AI workloads and inference data scale across multiple clouds, regions, and technology platforms, enterprises need faster, smarter ways to manage traffic traversing complexity. By combining Alkira's carrier-agnostic architecture with Lumen's network—one of the largest fiber networks in North America—Lumen can help customers manage traffic consistently across global environments.
As integration progresses, Alkira's technology is expected to become part of the Lumen Connect solution, consolidating Lumen's multi-cloud gateway, cloud access points, and on-net and off-net connectivity into a streamlined digital experience. Lumen Connect provides customers with a single platform to build and manage secure connections across clouds, sites, partners, and AI workloads, simplifying network operations, improving efficiency, and advancing Lumen's Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) roadmap. Through this integration, Lumen's infrastructure and programmable network lay the foundation for managing modern technology environments, combining proprietary network performance, intelligent orchestration, and global reach to help customers act faster, operate more efficiently, and adapt flexibly as needs change.
Gartner named Lumen a Leader in the June 2026 report "Competitive Landscape: AI Providers, Lumen is a Leader in Enterprise WAN and AI Connectivity Services." Gartner noted that by combining Lumen's fiber reach, dense metro infrastructure, and edge capabilities with Alkira's cloud-native control plane, the company enhances its ability to extend leadership into enterprise AI WAN and connectivity services. The report was authored by Kameron Chao, Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, and Karen Brown, and published on June 25, 2026.
