This week, Zayo broke ground on three of its new long-haul dark fiber routes, specifically built to meet the needs of artificial intelligence (AI), and announced the 400 Gbps enablement of its North American core network.
The three dark fiber routes, part of the company’s multi-year planned buildout of 5,000 miles of dark fiber — which are needed to support growing AI usage — are:
Chicago to Columbus: This 385-mile, low-latency fiber route between Chicago and Columbus is designed to support high-throughput, AI-driven workloads by providing connectivity to all major data centers in both cities.
Chicago to Minneapolis: This new 521-mile dark fiber route will link the key Chicago and Minneapolis AI data center hubs of Chicago and Minneapolis. The route offers high fiber counts and direct connections to Zayo’s AI-optimized corridors.
Phoenix to Tucson: This planned construction of a 123-mile high-capacity fiber route between Phoenix and Tucson will connect data centers in one of the Southwest’s fastest-growing AI corridors.
The company also outlined its network advances in the second quarter of the year:
- Completed the full 400G upgrade of its North American core network to deliver high-capacity, low-latency infrastructure
- Added 393.6 terabits of optical capacity, including 10 additional 400G-enabled points of presence (PoPs) to its network
- Expanded its fiber monitoring capabilities to more than 14,000 total route miles
- Expanded its IP network with the deployment of six new IP PoPs, including two new 400G-enabled PoPs in Montreal and Chicago
- Introduced 25 new Quick Connect Data Centers — bringing its total more than 100 — which are designed to get IP and ethernet services operational within 10 days
“AI requires scale at an order of magnitude greater than any technology we’ve seen before,” said Bill Long, Zayo chief product and strategy officer, in a prepared statement about the dark fiber routes.
“As the only provider to build long-haul infrastructure at scale in the last decade, Zayo is uniquely positioned to deliver on this need in a way that no one else in the market can. We’re not just building the infrastructure AI requires today, we’re powering connectivity between these key AI corridors, and the communities along the way, for years to come.”
The dark fiber buildouts were made possible, in part, by asset-backed financing Zayo obtained earlier this year.
