Lumen Collabs with Meta for Additional Fibre Routes

The company is constructing 130,000 fibre route miles to support both Meta and other customers seeking to interconnect AI-enabled data centers.

Oct 28, 2024

Lumen, a global communications services provider, is building new fibre routes for Meta in its latest move to “reinvent itself as a fibre-rich AI enabler, as per a report by Light Reading.

Lumen CTO Dave Ward said, ‘‘Meta has been a longtime customer of Lumen’s, and this latest partnership will support Meta’s AI ambitions with additional fibre routes connecting the hyperscaler’s data centers. Lumen will be building new routes with new fibre made with “extremely high-density cables. “

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Ward said that Lumen will utilize fiber from Corning to support its buildout for Meta. In August, Lumen said it would reserve 10% of Corning’s global fiber capacity over the next two years for network build outs to interconnect AI data centers.

There are currently over 5,000 data centers in the US and 2,500 are under construction, said Ward. The AI-enabled data centers that Lumen is connecting are the “multi-hundred megawatt and single or multi-gigawatt size,” he said.

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The company is constructing 130,000 fibre route miles to support both Meta and other customers seeking to interconnect AI-enabled data centers. Fibre conduits, tubing which protects individual fibre strands, in this buildout will contain anywhere from 144 to over 500 fibres to connect multi-gigawatt data centers.