Verizon just gave the AI buildout a plainer name: fiber in the ground. Its new Google deal is worth more than $1 billion, and Dan Schulman says more are coming before year-end.
Verizon's most interesting AI announcement this week didn't involve a model, a chip, or a chatbot. Not even close. It was a dark fiber deal with Google, worth more than $1 billion, disclosed by CEO Dan Schulman on Verizon's second-quarter earnings call on July 24, 2026. Reuters reported that Verizon will provide dark fiber connectivity for Google's data centers, which is a dry sentence until you sit with the scale of what Google is building.
This is physical infrastructure. Dark fiber means the glass strands are there, but the customer lights them with its own equipment. For Google, that gives more control over capacity and routing between data center facilities. For Verizon, it means the old telecom asset suddenly has a new buyer with a much larger appetite. Verizon supplies the pipes. Google brings the traffic.
One billion dollars is the headline number, but Schulman's more important line was about what comes next. Reuters reported that he expects other deals to be announced by the end of 2026 that, taken together, could be worth multiple billions of dollars over the next several years. Light Reading added that Verizon plans to use long-haul and metro fiber assets for AI data center connectivity, supplied as dark or lit fiber depending on what the customer needs.
That's the shift. This isn't Verizon trying to sound modern by stapling AI onto an earnings call. It's selling the part of AI nobody can pretend away: cables, routes, central offices, latency, construction crews, and capacity between data centers. If you're watching the AI economy only through Nvidia chips and cloud revenue, you're missing the ground it has to run through.
The Google deal also sits apart from the companies' existing work together around AI, cloud, and 5G. This is not a software partnership. It is Verizon selling network infrastructure to a hyperscaler that needs more of it quickly. Reuters reported this week that Alphabet raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to between $195 billion and $205 billion, after previously guiding to $180 billion to $190 billion. That money has to become servers, data centers, power systems, and connections between them.
Fast.
Schulman was careful about timing. Light Reading reported that the new AI infrastructure revenue is expected to start contributing next year, not in the current quarter. The public disclosures so far don't give the length of the Google agreement, the specific routes, or the deployment schedule. Those missing details matter. This is early revenue, not a finished reinvention.
Telecom's Old Asset Has A New Buyer
Telecom investors have spent years treating carriers as slow-growth dividend machines, tied to wireless churn, phone upgrades, and broadband adds. Verizon's Q2 numbers still live in that world. Light Reading reported 184,000 postpaid phone net additions in the quarter, the company's highest consumer second-quarter gain in five years, along with 348,000 fiber broadband and fixed wireless access additions.
Good numbers. Not a new story.
The dark fiber deal is different because it points to a revenue line that doesn't depend on persuading another household to switch mobile plans. Verizon has long-haul and metro fiber. Some of it is existing capacity, and Light Reading reported that the company is also building new fiber routes for the AI infrastructure market. It is also retrofitting thousands of central offices where copper is being decommissioned, turning some of those sites into edge data centers for lower-latency AI inferencing.
That is a much more interesting use of a telecom footprint than another bundle discount. At the same time, you shouldn't overread it. A billion-dollar contract doesn't erase the boring work of execution, and Schulman was coy, according to Light Reading, about how much Verizon may need to invest in new fiber to serve this market. If the AI Connect revenue is meant to be incremental, Verizon still has to prove the new demand doesn't drag capital spending higher than investors expect.
There are signs this is not just a Verizon story. BIG Fiber announced on May 19, 2026 that it secured $250 million in financing led by Stonepeak Credit and La Caisse to expand high-capacity dark fiber infrastructure, bringing its total assets to more than 800 route miles. Data Center Knowledge reported that the financing is aimed at dark fiber routes and capacity as hyperscalers and data center operators push into new AI markets.
Frankly, that is the real signal. The companies making foundation models may get the attention, but the buildout is starting to reward whoever controls scarce physical paths between compute sites. McKinsey estimated in March that global data center spending could reach $7 trillion by 2030, and the World Economic Forum highlighted McKinsey's estimate that $5.2 trillion of that could be tied to AI workloads alone. Even if those estimates prove too high, the direction is obvious enough: AI is pulling money toward the physical layer.
For Verizon, the test is simple. Announcing more deals before year-end would show that Google was not a one-off customer. Failing to do that would make this look like a good contract wrapped in a bigger story than the facts can yet support. For now, the facts are enough to take seriously: Google is paying Verizon more than $1 billion for dark fiber, Schulman says multiple billions more are in the pipeline, and the AI buildout needs a lot more than GPUs.
Also read: Big Tech is spending $700 billion on AI while cutting 168,000 jobs and calling it efficiency; The UK and Israel just appointed their first national AI chiefs and every founder should pay attention; Waymo fires Uber as a partner and the robotaxi war starts for real
