Zayo announced plans to construct over 5,000 long-haul fiber route miles to support the surging demand for AI workloads, expected to grow between 2-6X by 2030. With more than $4 billion in AI-related deals and pipeline driving this investment, Zayo aims to prevent a looming bandwidth shortage as AI adoption accelerates. The company is leveraging its leadership in long-haul infrastructure to expand connectivity between key data center hubs and emerging markets, ensuring scalable, low-latency solutions for AI and cloud providers.
The planned buildout includes five new long-haul fiber routes and overbuilds on seven existing ones, targeting areas of rapid data center growth and favorable power availability. These projects complement Zayo’s existing 16.5-million-fiber-mile North American network, which saw 14 new 400G-enabled routes added in 2024. Zayo’s ongoing investments also include scaling deployment capabilities with enhanced tools and workflows to optimize project efficiency and meet the demands of AI-driven growth.
“Keeping pace with the next wave of AI growth will require new long-haul networks to enable the rapid scaling of capacity needs,” said Steve Smith, CEO of 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.”
• New Routes:
• Chicago to Columbus
• Las Vegas to Reno, Nevada
• Atlanta to Ashburn, Virginia
• Minneapolis to Chicago
• Columbus, Ohio, to Indianapolis
• Overbuilds:
• Denver to Dallas
• Denver to Omaha to Chicago
• Denver to Salt Lake City
• Salt Lake City to Reno
• Dallas to Atlanta
• Columbus, Ohio, to Ashburn, Virginia
• Phoenix to Tucson, Arizona
• Completed Routes (Last 5 Years):
• New Routes: Portland to Umatilla, Oregon; Atlanta to Dallas; Columbus to Pittsburgh, among others.
• Overbuilds: Las Vegas to Phoenix; Seattle to Vancouver; Chicago to Omaha, among others.