CEO Dan Schulman said Friday that Verizon has struck a deal with Google worth more than $1 billion to supply dark-fiber links for the search engine giant’s data centers.
Schulman disclosed the contract during Verizon’s post-earnings call, according to Reuters. The companies did not provide details about the agreement’s duration, geographic scope or deployment schedule.
Dark fiber is installed fiber-optic infrastructure that a customer operates using its own networking equipment. Unlike a managed network service, it gives the customer greater control over capacity and network design. For Google, the agreement will support connectivity between its data-center facilities.
Google’s AI spend
Alphabet reported negative free cash flow of approximately $5.9 billion in the second quarter, its first negative quarter since going public in 2004, as spending on AI infrastructure accelerated.
The Google parent raised its 2026 capital-expenditure guidance to between $195 billion and $205 billion, up from $180 billion to $190 billion, with most of the spending directed toward servers, data centers and networking equipment. Alphabet also plans to expand its use of third-party compute capacity as a temporary bridge while it builds additional infrastructure internally.
Data Center growth
Verizon expects to disclose additional agreements before the end of 2026, although Schulman did not identify the prospective customers or provide individual contract values.
“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 expected agreements would create a multiyear revenue opportunity beyond Verizon’s core consumer wireless and home-internet operations. The Google contract concerns data-center connectivity and is separate from the companies’ earlier work involving artificial intelligence, cloud services and 5G networks.
In 2021, Verizon and Google Cloud agreed to combine Verizon’s 5G network with Google’s computing services for factory automation. Verizon later offered Google One AI Premium to eligible wireless and home-internet customers, while Google’s Gemini models have been integrated into Verizon’s customer-service systems.
Verizon raises its 2026 outlook
Verizon disclosed the dark-fiber deal as it reported second-quarter results and raised its full-year forecasts for adjusted earnings and free cash flow.
Verizon said it added 184,000 wireless subscribers who pay monthly bills during the quarter, topping the 103,900 additions expected by analysts surveyed by FactSet. The company has rolled out simplified unlimited plans and bundled wireless and broadband billing as Schulman seeks to improve subscriber growth.
