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From the newsletter (September 8; sign-up if you want it sooner): Verizon is buying 80 million miles of Corning fiber through 2032 as it builds a converged network for broadband, mobile, enterprise and AI data-center connectivity – betting on fiber as the physical foundation of the AI economy.
Breaking news – in brief, at press: Verizon has signed a mega deal with Corning for 80m miles (about 130 million kilometers) of high-density optical fiber and “connectivity solutions” through 2032 in the US – as it looks to build a “single, converged architecture” to “unite mobile connectivity and broadband”, and serve everyone – consumers, families, businesses – and to meanwhile construct also a long-haul high-capacity and low-latency fiber backbone for AI hyperscalers. Which is a mouthful, right there. “We are securing the physical foundation of America’s AI economy,” said Kyle Malady, chief executive at Verizon Business.
Verizon breaks-down the various uses and users. The deal, covering deployments from 2027, is intended to support Verizon’s target of reaching 40-50m broadband FTTH passings for homes and offices, plus for carrier cell towers and enterprise data centers. The firm said: “This multi-use fiber foundation serves as the physical engine for the AI era. Because heavy AI workloads demand near-zero latency and massive throughput, high-density fiber is essential to support the ever-growing scale of LLMs.” It goes on to present its AI Connect strategy, covered very well in these pages, to deploy “ultra-dense” cables along major long-haul corridors to directly connect data centers.
It stated: “By expanding this critical interconnectivity, Verizon cements its position as the premier infrastructure partner for the world’s leading AI hyperscalers, such as AWS”. The single name-drop feels significant, and maybe reveals something of the investment case behind it. Verizon chief Dan Schulman told a Q2 earnings call in July that it has a $1bn agreement with Google Cloud to let its dark fiber – with more deals to come in 2026, he said, to drive its revenue growth by “multiple billions” in 2027. “This is just the beginning,” he commented. The deal with Corning, with mega-sized supply agreements with Meta, Nvidia, AWS besides, is the cap-ex build story – for a single network to serve them all.
