Two “simultaneous infrastructure supercycles” — the mass deployment of fiber and the emergence of AI — are combining to transform the landscape for network operators, infrastructure investors, data-center developers, communities, and policymakers, according to a white paper published this week by Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) president and CEO Gary Bolton.
The white paper, “Building the Nervous System of a Thinking Economy: How the Convergence of Fiber Broadband & Artificial Intelligence Is Reshaping Economic Infrastructure,” provides many statistics and dollar values to make the point that the rollout of fiber and AI both are on historic scales.
For instance, the FBA and RVA Market Research found that U.S. fiber providers passed a record 11.8 million homes in 2025 to bring total U.S. fiber passings to 98.4 million, including multiple passings and 84.6 million unique homes. That represents 11% annual growth.
On the AI side, the white paper says Amazon reported $131.8 billion in capital expenditures last year, much of which was for AI infrastructure, AWS data centers, networking equipment and custom AI chips. The executive summary offers equally impressive numbers for Alphabet, Meta and OpenAI.
The white paper describes how these two sectors are reinforcing each other and are expanding into other areas, all of which have their own unique requirements.
“The central thesis is straightforward: fiber is no longer simply an access technology,” the white paper said. “It is becoming the nervous system of a thinking economy — the connective layer through which intelligence is generated, distributed, and acted upon at scale.”
The bulk of the paper poses and answers 13 questions:
- What is a “thinking economy” and why does it matter for fiber infrastructure?
- What does the data show about the current scale of U.S. fiber deployment?
- How much of U.S. fiber deployment is federally funded versus privately financed?
- What is the AI infrastructure supercycle and how does it relate to fiber?
- What is the OpenAI Stargate project and how large is the fiber demand it creates?
- How much new fiber infrastructure does AI demand require by 2029?
- Why does the FBA argue that fiber is now national critical infrastructure?
- How does fiber serve national defense and military applications?
- What does the IEA say about data-center power demand and what does it mean for fiber strategy?
- What does fiber convergence with AI mean for network operators strategically?
- How should infrastructure investors evaluate fiber in the context of AI?
- What should communities do to compete for AI-era economic development?
- What policy reforms does the FBA recommend for the AI-fiber convergence era?
This is not the first time the FBA has had something to say about AI. In May, the organization outlined why fiber should be seen as core infrastructure for hyperscale AI. The report is entitled “The Fourth Pillar of the AI Era: Fiber and the Physical Architecture of Intelligence.”
