By Gary Bolton / Fiber Broadband Association
Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving the next wave of innovation and IT productivity. Exactly how far this wave will go and how fast it will travel is anyone’s guess at this point, but as AI continues to grow, it will grow and thrive by fully utilizing the 21st-century telecommunications infrastructure being deployed at an ever-increasing rate to support the growth in hyperscale data centers around the world.
Fiber, with its reliability, practically unlimited upgrade potential, security, and low latency, is the only technology that can support AI's ever-increasing needs as it is built within data centers and accessed by people from all walks of life.
While the harbinger of AI may have been seen in NVIDIA’s explosive growth over the past five years, it became clear last year to the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) and the world at large that AI wasn’t simply a quaint gizmo able to generate sophisticated illustrations with a single phrase, but a powerful tool being injected into every application and sector to increase productivity and unlock new applications.
Providers raise fiber investments
AI is driving significant investments in fiber.
Consider Zayo’s March 2025 announcement to acquire Crown Castle’s Fiber Solutions business for $4.25 billion, as it cited the need to invest in fiber to support the growth of AI across the United States. In August 2024, Lumen said it was working to more than double its intercity network miles to support AI for cloud data centers, enterprises, and public agencies, reserving 10% of Corning’s global fiber capacity for each of the next two years. That’s a lot of fiber to connect machines, places, and applications.
Large-scale data service companies are buying 400 Gbps and faster connections across their footprint of existing and building-in-progress locations to support the growth of large clusters for machine learning and model training. They are also distributing production AI models closer to their workloads and users, with implications beyond straightforward human/machine interactions.
AI-to-AI communication is expected to generate a massive step change in data traffic in the coming decade, as different, distinct processes feed into other ones to extract value and refine insights. Consider the voice desktop assistant, which uses speech-to-text in response to a query, processes the text to generate an action, and then uses text-to-speech to deliver an answer to a human.
Emerging AI applications
Fiber Forward Editor-in-Chief Doug Mohney saw one part of the AI/fiber future at CES 2025 in January when he met with PwC’s Chief AI Engineering Officer Scott Likens and his interactive AI-powered virtual twin, dubbed Synthetic Scott. In less than 18 months, PwC could go from a simple cartoon-like avatar to a realistic full-body emulation of Likens displayed in a hologram “box” that included a perfect-pitch voice and his characteristic mannerisms. Rapid advances in machine vision processing enabled PwC to bypass motion capture suits and green screens to capture Scott, with the current version able to use a simple 2-minute video capture from a smartphone.
PwC believes that while AI has generated concerns about increasing electrical demand, technology can also provide solutions by creating more efficient ways to conserve and generate power. This would benefit not just hyperscale data centers but all industries, resulting in lower carbon emissions and increased productivity.
AI is already increasing productivity opportunities in one of America’s oldest and most treasured fields. Precision agriculture enables farmers of all sizes to optimize their crop yields using a data-based planting and crop management approach. Water, fertilizer, and other inputs can be applied in the exact right amount to the same field and plant to ensure optimum growing conditions, reducing waste and increasing profitability. Recommendations come from machine-learning models trained with real-world data, such as the ones Land O’Lakes offers.
Farming has always been a data-driven business, but the last decade has truly brought IT’s many tools into the field, including the internet of things to monitor soil and crop conditions, satellite imagery for watching crop health and estimating yields, and sophisticated AI programs to ingest all of the data and provide insights into the best way to plant and harvest crops. The next step in the precision agriculture revolution is autonomous vehicles and robots that will till fields, plant crops, and harvest them, increasing productivity while reducing manpower. A farmer no longer needs to spend long hours driving a tractor back and forth across his land but can have his autonomous tractor do it while he monitors the process from his office or on his cell phone while he’s off doing something else.
John Deere is on its second generation of autonomous vehicle technology. It requires sufficient fiber bandwidth between its machines, centralized data centers, and farmers to control them and regularly update the operating software that keeps them safely running and steadily improving. While imaging processing is done onboard the vehicle for latency reasons, farmers need to see why a tractor has stopped in the field – usually because of a wayward cow, mind you – while the constant telematics data flowing from machines is analyzed to provide predicative analytics on when parts and service are needed to decrease downtime.
AI is not one-size-fits-all, but is likely to be a set of mix-and-match models. Machine learning and applications will be built and trained within large-scale data centers, and then could be distributed regionally for workload distribution and low-latency response time. Models will also be right-sized for distribution at the network's edge for specific tasks, such as pattern recognition, and then updated as needed with fiber.
From the network perspective, AI Operations (AIOps) provides better cybersecurity and helps optimize uptime by focusing on reductions in human error while increasing network reliability and faster restoration times when outages occur. Lumen is applying AI to improve customer experience and has built a digital twin of its entire network to support its Quantum Fiber service. Using the digital twin, Lumen can test new configurations and do traffic flow analysis before deploying hardware and software changes in the network. It can also predict customer support issues and provide solutions as needed.
Fiber Connect spotlights AI
At Fiber Connect 2025 in Nashville, James Feger, Lumen’s Senior Vice President of Product Segments, will discuss the impact of AI at a keynote session on Tuesday, June 2, 2025. Other FBA resources are also available to learn more about the virtuous circle of fiber and AI.
In March, FBA released the Accelerating AI with Fiber: Systems and Strategies white paper and expects to release a second one later this year. FBA has also created an AI committee to discuss the impact and opportunities this new technology is delivering.
The 24-page Accelerating AI with Fiber: Systems and Strategies paper examines fiber’s critical role in three areas of AI-driven innovation: data centers, fiber networks, and homes. AI Fiber in Perspective, the second FBA white paper, will present AI fiber trends using a People, Process, and Technology model and an assessment from growth and industry leaders.
AI is the future, and that future doesn’t happen without fiber. AI’s continued growth in the decades to come will drive high-speed connectivity across all sectors and locations, with fiber ensuring that AI reaches everyone, everywhere, with the appropriate speeds and low latency it needs to thrive.
Gary Bolton is the president and CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association.
With more than three decades in the telecom industry, Bolton joined the Fiber Broadband Association as president and CEO in 2020 after serving on the association’s board as vice chairman, treasurer, and vice chair of public policy and marketing committees.
Before taking the leadership role at the Fiber Broadband Association, Gary spent 11 years at ADTRAN serving as vice president of global marketing and government affairs.