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Source: businesswire | Published on: Tuesday, 21 January 2025
DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Zayo, a leading communications infrastructure provider, today announced it intends to build more than 5,000 long-haul fiber route miles to meet the growing demands of AI workloads. As the only digital infrastructure company to build long-haul networks at scale in the last decade, Zayo’s investment will be critical to averting a potential bandwidth gap in the U.S. as AI-driven data center capacity is expected to grow 2-6X over the next five years.
"Keeping pace with the next wave of AI growth will require new long-haul networks to enable the rapid scaling of capacity needs in both existing and emerging AI data center markets. In 2024, Zayo saw significant AI-driven demand for long-haul routes, including more than $1 billion in AI-related deals and an additional $3 billion in pipeline. This demand shows no signs of letting up,” said Steve Smith, Chief Executive Officer at Zayo. "As the complexity of long-haul builds continues to be prohibitive to many providers, Zayo remains the only company building long-haul routes at scale to lead this next phase of infrastructure growth.”
To ensure customers can scale alongside AI demand, Zayo plans to build five new long-haul routes, in addition to overbuilds of seven key existing routes, over the next five years. The routes will enable direct, low-latency, and scalable paths between key data center hubs and forecasted growth areas. The route locations were determined based on expected data center growth, power availability, existing capacity constraints, and other regional characteristics. Additional routes and investments will be determined throughout the year.
The new and expanded routes will include:
New Routes:
Overbuilds:
Over the last five years, Zayo has completed 15 new long-haul routes totaling over 5,000 fiber route miles, including:
New (approximately 2,700 route miles)
Overbuild (approximately 2,600 route miles)
In addition to its capital investments, Zayo is scaling its long-haul deployment capabilities by expanding its team and introducing specialized functions to drive project efficiency and oversight. These functions include new tools, standardized workflows, and future-ready automations to support increasing workloads and drive value of long-haul projects.
Why This Matters: In Q4 2024, along with an independent research firm, Zayo worked to forecast the magnitude, duration, and location of AI-driven bandwidth demand. The findings, which helped inform Zayo’s accelerated investment, include:
Zayo’s Additional North American Network Investments:
Zayo continues to be one of the only providers actively investing in expanding its network. Zayo’s North America network spans 16.5 million fiber miles with 700,000 fiber miles and 14 new 400G-enabled wavelength routes added in 2024. Zayo also reached a petabit of active Waves services in 2024, and its North American network will be fully 400G enabled by the end of 2025.
For more information on Zayo’s network capabilities, please visit www.zayo.com.
About Zayo
For more than 17 years, Zayo has empowered some of the world’s largest and most innovative companies to connect what’s next for their business. The Zayo group of companies connects 400 global markets with future-ready networks that span over 18.7 million fiber miles and 146,000 route miles. Zayo's tailored connectivity solutions and managed services enable carriers, cloud providers, data centers, schools, and enterprises to deliver exceptional experiences, from core to cloud to edge. Discover how Zayo connects what’s next at www.zayo.com and follow us on LinkedIn.
