The agreement, disclosed on Verizon’s Q2 2026 earnings call, focuses on activating unused fiber to connect Google data centers as AI demand drives spending on dedicated network capacity.
Verizon disclosed a deal worth more than $1 billion with Google to activate dark fiber linking the company’s data centers, underscoring how AI spending is increasingly flowing into the physical network infrastructure needed to move large volumes of data between facilities. Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman announced the agreement during Verizon’s Q2 2026 earnings call and said the company could secure additional connectivity deals worth billions more before the end of 2026, while also raising full-year guidance. The arrangement centers on dark fiber, or unused optical fiber that can be lit to provide dedicated, high-capacity connections rather than bandwidth on shared networks. Those links are important for AI workloads, which depend on fast movement of data across data centers. The deal also offers a benchmark for decentralized physical infrastructure, or DePIN, projects such as Filecoin, Render and Akash, which are trying to provide distributed alternatives to centralized infrastructure at scale.