Infinera Drops $27 Million for Its Facility in San Jose

A Nokia-owned chipmaker has purchased its office and research building in south San Jose.

Infinera, a San Jose-based maker of optical chips, bought 6373 San Ignacio Avenue for $27 million, the Mercury News reported. Nokia and Infinera created a plant at the building to manufacture Infinera’s optical chips — an increasingly hot commodity as data centers and artificial intelligence programs proliferate and require technology to power them.

An affiliate of Beverly Hills-based real estate firm Kennedy Wilson sold the building to Infinera in an all-cash deal. The production hub of the building is on the ground floor of the two-story office and research building. The structure, part of a cluster of office buildings known as Valley Oak Technology Center, was erected in 2002 and totals 82,100 square feet.

Infinera relocated its headquarters to 6373 San Ignacio from Sunnyvale.

Finland-based Nokia bought Infinera last February for $2.3 billion, allowing Infinera to join the Nokia optical networks business. In acquiring Infinera, Nokia believes it will “significantly improve [its] scale and profitability in optical networks,” Pekka Lundmark, CEO of Nokia, said at the time of the acquisition, per the Mercury News. The purchase “allows [Nokia] to speed up the pace of innovation to meet the requirements of the AI era.”

San Jose is one of the hotspots for data centers in Silicon Valley.

In December, a Menlo Equities affiliate proposed converting an office and research building at 300 Holger Way into a nearly 100,000-square-foot data center. Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company and a leader in chipmaking for AI, has been leasing the space since last year. A month before that, news surfaced that Prologis was near turning a 159-acre stretch of vacant land in north San Jose into roughly 1.7 million square feet of data center space across four buildings. — Chris Malone Méndez