Lumen’s acquisition of Alkira signals the importance of multi-cloud networking solutions in the AI era

On 5 May 2026, Lumen announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire Alkira, which offers a cloud-native, carrier-agnostic, multi-cloud networking (MCN) solution. As a strong player in the network-as-a-service (NaaS) space, Lumen has long been investing in improving network programmability and simplifying MCN. However, this acquisition has the potential to further boost Lumen’s ability to support enterprises with fulfilling the changing connectivity demands that are being spurred by AI workloads.