Michael Flannery is President of Uniti Solutions.
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If U.S. enterprises want to utilize AI to maintain their dominance, they will need an innovative communications infrastructure designed to support demands, both now and for many years to come. The massive and growing appetite for data demands high-capacity data transport segments and networks that can move information at lightning speed between data centers, clouds and end users. Thus, there is a rush to build fiber-optic digital corridors across North America and the globe.
In fact, AI is only as effective as the infrastructure behind it. So, if your business uses AI in its operations, you should be paying close attention to who’s building these digital corridors, where and when, because this is the infrastructure that will determine, in large part, how fast, reliable, scalable and secure your AI systems can be.
While the nicknames for some of these fiber optic digital highways—Heartland Fiber Project, the "Beach Route," T-Rock Express—seem like they’ve been lifted from our past, the corridors themselves are integral to a present and future that depend on AI.
Digital corridor projects can stretch hundreds and even thousands of miles and cost billions of dollars. Many involve public-private partnerships and consortia with multiple companies, including telecom companies with fiber optic networks, infrastructure providers, energy and electricity providers, hyperscalers, neocloud providers and more. Some link large metro areas to lower-cost data center markets, while others cross borders or run subsea, carrying data between countries and continents.
Fiber infrastructure projects today aren’t just about bringing higher-performing, fiber-optic-supported internet to underserved areas. They’re part of a much larger story, one where stakeholders are investing to develop the AI infrastructure of the AI economy. These corridors are designed to scale to meet the multi-terabit demands of AI, accommodating speeds of 100G, 400G, 800G and higher.
Digital corridors represent the essential infrastructure on which businesses, public entities and consumers will rely to securely move the large volumes of data that AI needs in order to do its customers' work. Here are four reasons businesses should be paying close attention to digital infrastructure development.
Organizations that rely on AI for data-intensive workloads (e.g., advanced analytics, agentic and generative AI) need networks that can deliver ultra-low-latency, high speeds/throughput and a high degree of scalability for the future. In many cases, AI systems depend on distributed compute architectures, with workloads spanning multiple data centers and regions.
When data cannot move quickly and reliably, insights arrive more slowly and AI systems become harder to scale. So, companies with ambitious AI plans would be wise to ensure they have access to fiber-optic networks with the performance characteristics to support their current and planned AI workloads. This is a vital part of future-proofing a business.
Undersea cables play critical roles in the global movement of data, as a large number of subsea cables carry nearly all internet traffic globally. Just in the Red Sea alone, close to one-fifth of the world’s data transits that small span of water.
While this potential choke point isn’t a huge concern for U.S.-only companies, it highlights the need for interconnected businesses to consider digital routing strategies to ensure there’s redundancy built into their external data transport options to support mission-critical AI workflows in the event of a disruption. They also need to consider geopolitical and security risks, particularly with border and subsea crossings, which can be especially vulnerable to sabotage or collateral damage during conflicts.
Regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the U.S. and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe are putting tighter restrictions on how organizations handle data. Businesses are also increasingly taking steps to keep their sensitive data from being exposed to competitors or bad actors.
As data volumes grow and new regulations take hold, it’s vital for organizations to keep close tabs on where exactly their data is traveling and where it resides to ensure they don’t trigger legal liabilities, data residency/jurisdictional issues or other compliance issues.
Driven by the fast rise of AI, proximity to key digital corridors has gained strategic importance. Understanding how corridor dynamics are unfolding and who the key players are can help companies pursue partnerships with infrastructure developers and locate facilities and assets strategically. This is all in the name of gaining cost, performance and reliability advantages over the competition.
What looks today like a telecom build-out may, in hindsight, be seen as one of the defining business stories of the modern era. Digital corridors are redrawing the map of where AI can scale, where data can move and where companies can opportunistically use that infrastructure to gain a competitive advantage.
To stay ahead in the AI economy, business leaders should start evaluating whether their network infrastructure is ready for what’s next—and explore how scalable fiber investment can support long-term performance, resilience and growth.
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