Verizon Signs $2bn+ Dark Fibre Deal With AWS

Verizon has signed an agreement with Amazon Web Services worth more than $2bn, the US carrier said on 26 October, as it pushes to sell fibre capacity to the companies building AI infrastructure. On its earnings call the same day, chief executive Dan Schulman called it “a dark fiber agreement”. Dark fibre is cable sold or leased unlit, for the customer to run with its own equipment.

The company gave a value and little else. Verizon did not disclose the length of the contract, how many route miles or fibre strands it covers, where the fibre runs or when AWS will start paying. AWS had not published its own statement on the deal at the time of writing.

In brief

Verizon says it has signed an agreement “valued at $2.0+ billion” with AWS, which Schulman described on the call as a dark fibre deal.
Verizon says its AI Connect business now has about $4bn of signed contracts, with revenue starting in 2027.
No term, capacity, route or payment schedule has been disclosed.

A $2bn agreement announced inside a quarterly results release

The deal was not announced on its own. It appeared as a line in Verizon’s third-quarter results release, which said the company had “signed an agreement valued at $2.0+ billion with AWS that establishes a commercial framework to scale distributed compute and meet the real-time demands of agentic and generative AI workloads”. Verizon filed the same release with the SEC.

Schulman’s quote in the release did not name Amazon, but said “technology leaders are choosing our fiber network to power the next generation of AI infrastructure”.

He was more specific on the earnings call. “Today, we announced that we have signed a dark fiber agreement with Amazon Web Services valued at over $2 billion,” he said, adding that it built on an agreement with Google that Verizon announced last quarter. “These two contracts are a clear signal that the largest builders of AI infrastructure in the world are choosing Verizon as a strategic connectivity partner,” he said, which is Verizon’s own reading of the deals.

This is not the first fibre contract between the two companies. In November 2025, Verizon announced an AI Connect deal with AWS to build new long-haul fibre pathways between AWS data centre locations. Verizon has not said how the new agreement relates to that one, or whether it extends it.

Verizon says AI Connect has about $4bn of signed contracts

AI Connect is the name Verizon gives to its business selling fibre and edge computing space to hyperscalers and other AI customers. “We now have signed contracts for approximately $4 billion,” Schulman said on the call, a figure that includes the AWS and Google deals and what he described as “hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues” from its edge computing sites.

Verizon has given no breakdown of that $4bn by customer. Schulman said the company has an “active pipeline of additional hyperscalers, neocloud providers, and large enterprise clients who are in negotiations to have us supply them with either dark or lit fiber connectivity”. Lit fibre is a managed service that Verizon would run itself.

The revenue is some way off. “We will begin to see their impact in 2027,” Schulman said, describing the agreements as “long-duration contracts with high-quality counterparties” with “attractive margins”. Chief financial officer Tony Skiadas said the deals are “very customer specific, so no two deals are alike”, and that on the Google deal Verizon is “already processing orders for fiber”.

On cost, Schulman said “the incremental capital required to deliver against these agreements is modest and success-based and tied to defined contracts”. Verizon kept its 2026 capital spending guidance at $16bn to $16.5bn, which the release says is “inclusive of success-based investments for AI Connect”.

Supply is the other half of the story. Schulman pointed to a multi-year agreement with Corning, announced last month, for more than 80 million miles of fibre through 2032. Industry tracker TrendForce cited that same deal when it warned that optical fibre prices have jumped severalfold as AI demand outruns supply.

Verizon is selling fibre scarcity before the AI revenue arrives

The AWS deal tells investors more about Verizon’s strategy than about AWS’s network. A carrier that spent the past year fighting over phone subscribers now has two of the largest cloud companies signed to fibre contracts, and says others are negotiating. That is a new revenue line for a company whose growth has long depended on wireless pricing, and it explains why Verizon put the AWS deal among the first highlights of its results release.

The timing is also telling. Fibre has become a constraint on AI build-outs, as TrendForce’s figures show, and the networking layer is increasingly seen as a bottleneck in the AI race alongside chips and power. A dark fibre contract lets AWS secure physical capacity it can light as it wishes, while Verizon locks in long-term revenue on assets it already owns or is already buying from Corning.

What the announcement lacks is the detail needed to judge the price. A $2bn-plus figure means one thing over five years and another over 20, and Verizon has disclosed neither the term nor the capacity. Without them, the deal cannot be compared with other hyperscaler fibre contracts, and Verizon’s claim of “attractive margins” cannot be tested. Verizon is also a company that is still demonstrating new capabilities elsewhere in its network, such as its pre-standard 6G field call with Ericsson, so AI Connect is one of several bets rather than the whole story.

The test will come next quarter. Schulman said Verizon will explain how AI Connect contributes to its 2027 growth on its next earnings call. That is when the company will have to show how much of the $4bn arrives in 2027, and over how many years the rest is spread.