Zayo today announced major upgrades to its AI-ready infrastructure across North America, including breaking ground on three long-haul dark fiber routes.
- Chicago to Columbus: Zayo is advancing construction on a 385-mile, low-latency fiber route between Chicago and Columbus to support high-throughput, AI-driven workloads. With connectivity to all major data centers in both metros, the route strengthens a critical corridor between two of the nation’s top hyperscale markets.
- Chicago to Minneapolis: The company is constructing a brand-new 521-mile dark fiber route linking key AI data center hubs of Chicago and Minneapolis. Engineered for scale, the route features ultra-high fiber counts and direct connections to Zayo’s AI-optimized corridors, including Chicago to Columbus and Zayo’s SPREAD networks.
- Phoenix to Tucson: Zayo is building a 123-mile high-capacity fiber route between Phoenix and Tucson, connecting key data centers in one of the Southwest’s fastest-growing AI corridors. The route will directly connect into three future builds designed to meet customers’ AI demands, including Tucson to El Paso; El Paso to Dallas; and El Paso to Mexico.
Zayo also completed the full 400G upgrade of its North American core network. As demand for data-intensive technologies accelerates, 400G has become the new performance baseline. Last year, 400G wavelengths represented the largest share of total terabits purchased, outpacing both 10G and 100G solutions.
“As next-gen technologies demand more and more bandwidth, 400G connectivity is now the standard for high-growth businesses,” said Troy Lupe, Chief Network Officer at Zayo. “With our core network now fully 400G enabled, Zayo is leading the movement toward higher-capacity solutions, enabling our customers to support the bandwidth-intensive demands of AI, cloud computing, real-time analytics, and any other innovation to come next.”
Additional Q2 enhancements included:
- 394.6 Tb of added optical capacity, strengthening the network’s ability to handle massive volumes of data at high speeds and low latency.
- Expanded fiber monitoring to more 14,000 route miles.
- Six new IP PoPs including 400G-enabled locations in Montreal and Chicago.
- 25 new Quick Connect Data Centers, bringing their total to over 100 Quick Connect facilities.
