Verizon has signed a fiber infrastructure agreement with Google worth more than $1 billion, the company said Friday, positioning the carrier to profit from the surge in demand for connectivity between artificial-intelligence data centers. Chief Executive Dan Schulman announced the deal alongside Verizon's second-quarter results, and made clear he sees it as an opening move rather than a one-off.
"We have other deals that we expect to announce by year end that taken together are expected to be worth multiple billions of dollars in revenue over the next several years," Schulman said. The Google agreement, by his framing, is the first visible piece of a broader push to sell Verizon's network as the connective tissue of the AI build-out.
What Verizon is actually selling
The deal is for dark fiber — installed fiber-optic cable that the customer, in this case Google, lights and operates with its own networking equipment. That distinction matters. Unlike a managed network service, where the carrier runs the connection, dark fiber hands the buyer direct control over capacity and network design, which is attractive to a hyperscaler that wants to engineer its own low-latency links between facilities. For Google, the fiber will support connectivity across its data-center footprint.
Verizon's pitch rests on assets it already owns: a large base of long-haul and metro fiber that can be sold as dark or lit fiber depending on what a customer needs. The company is also retrofitting thousands of central offices — the buildings where it is decommissioning old copper lines — into edge data centers, aimed at the low-latency demands of AI inference, the stage where trained models actually answer queries and need to sit close to users.
Why Google is spending
The timing tracks with an enormous capital cycle at Google's parent, Alphabet, which recently raised its 2026 capital-expenditure guidance to between $195 billion and $205 billion, up from a prior range of $180 billion to $190 billion. The bulk of that money is going toward servers, data centers and networking gear. Building that much compute is only useful if the sites can move data between one another at scale, and that is the gap Verizon is offering to fill. In effect, the carrier is selling picks and shovels to one of the deepest-pocketed diggers in the AI gold rush.
Landing amid a stronger quarter
Schulman, the former PayPal chief who took over Verizon in October 2025, tied the agreement to a turnaround he says accelerated in the second quarter. Verizon reported earnings of about $1.30 per share on roughly $34.3 billion in revenue, beating Wall Street's profit estimate while coming in a touch under revenue expectations. More notably for investors, the company raised its full-year outlook for the second straight quarter, lifting its 2026 adjusted-earnings guidance to a range of $4.99 to $5.04 per share and projecting free-cash-flow growth of 9% to 10%, up from an earlier forecast of roughly 7% or more.
Schulman described the new fiber revenue as a stream that begins to kick in next year, layered on top of the core wireless and broadband business. Whether the "multiple billions" he is promising materialize will depend on those additional deals arriving on schedule — and on the AI infrastructure boom holding up long enough to pay for the fiber being sold into it.
This article is intended as news reporting, not investment advice.
