Dark fiber shines again?
Verizon touts $1B dark fiber deal for Google data centers as first of many
Telecom expects AI revenue from dark fiber deals and retrofitted data centers.
Verizon is seeking to tap into Silicon Valley’s AI spending in a big way. The telecom giant revealed a deal worth more than $1 billion to link Google data centers using Verizon’s dark fiber routes—and it’s also tearing copper wiring out of central offices as it converts them into small data centers suitable for supporting AI inference workloads.
The telecom company publicly disclosed the Google partnership and data center conversion efforts as part of a new “AI Connect” business initiative during an earnings conference call covering the second quarter of 2026. Verizon also expects to announce additional AI-related deals by the end of the year that would be “worth multiple billions of dollars in revenue over the next several years,” said Dan Schulman, CEO of Verizon Communications, during the earnings call.
“Now it really is about, ‘how do you connect data center to data center to assure that you can optimize to maximize the ever-exploding need for compute?’” Schulman said. “And while that data center connectivity demand is exploding, there’s an equal amount of desire and demand to power inference models and applications that need ultra-low latency, like robotics or remote surgery, autonomous driving, and move that out into the edge, as opposed to these big, massive data centers.”
Beyond repurposing dark fiber for hyperscalers’ AI data centers, Verizon is in the early stages of retrofitting some of its own central offices—locations that house the physical equipment for Internet and mobile networks—to become small data centers. Such “remote data centers” aim to support “inference edge computing” with minimal data latency for customers’ deployments of AI-driven services, such as autonomous robotaxi fleets or robotics applications, according to Schulman.
“We did a small trial on that and sold out capability in 24 hours,” Schulman said during the earnings call. “So we’re seeing a large demand for that as well.”
The telecom company had already been removing copper wiring from central offices and upgrading them with fiber-optic technology, even before looking to convert some offices into AI infrastructure for edge computing. That comes as Verizon continues retiring its legacy copper network in favor of faster and more power-efficient fiber-optic cables for broadband services.
Verizon also significantly grew its fiber network after finalizing a $20 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications at the start of 2026, which expanded Verizon’s fiber footprint from 15 states to 31 states along with Washington, DC. So selling some unused dark fiber capacity to Google and other AI-focused tech companies could help recoup some of those acquisition costs.
Verizon has also been cutting jobs even after laying off 13,000 workers at the end of 2025, leaving a workforce of just under 90,000 employees at the end of last year. Most recently, the company transferred 274 retail stores to franchise owners along with 2,500 employees and cut another 500 positions within its own corporate structure.
The telecom company expects its AI Connect deals to “begin to impact our revenues and margins beginning next year and grow substantially over the next five to 10 years,” Schulman said in response to a question during the earnings call. That would come on top of Verizon’s core mobility and broadband services that saw record second-quarter results this year.
