Verizon Lands $1 Billion Google Deal as AI Infrastructure Demand Soars

Verizon signed an over $1 billion artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure deal with Google, and the company expects to sign several similar deals by the end of the year, Verizon CEO Dan Schulman said Friday (July 24) during a second quarter earnings call.

In the recently signed agreement, Verizon dark fiber will be used to connect Google’s data centers. In the other deals that the company expects to announce by year’s end, Verizon will earn “multiple billions of dollars in revenue” over the next several years, Schulman said.

“These are long-duration, high-quality contracted revenue streams from some of the most demanding infrastructure customers in the world,” Schulman said.

“We believe that this is just the beginning,” Schulman added. “The build-out of AI infrastructure across the United States is one of the largest capital cycles of our lifetime.”

Verizon is uniquely positioned to participate in this build-out because it owns an extensive long-haul and metro fiber footprint and it has built the carrier-grade, low-latency, highly resilient transport network that hyperscalers need to connect compute, models and regions, Schulman said.

The company has also begun retrofitting many of its central offices into data centers for inference edgecomputing, and it is already talking with multiple partners who are eager to use these power-ready and permitted locations, he said.

“We are moving quickly to expand our TAM [total addressable market] in the rapidly growing AI infrastructure market,” Schulman said. “The agreements we have signed are the leading edge of a strategy that will become a meaningful, incremental leg of growth for Verizon.”

Verizon announced in a January 2025 press release that it launched a strategy and suite of products and solutions called Verizon AI Connect that is designed to serve hyperscalers, cloud providers and global enterprises by managing AI resource-intensive workloads.

The company said at the time that Google Cloud and Meta were among the early adopters of these solutions.

In a Friday earnings release, Schulman said: “Our core connectivity business is gaining momentum, and with the emergence of AI infrastructure revenue, we are fundamentally reshaping Verizon’s growth trajectory.”

PYMNTS reported Wednesday that during Google parent company Alphabet’s second-quarter earnings call, the company announced that it had raised its 2026 capital spending forecast from the previous $180 billion to $190 billion to the new forecast of $195 billion to $205 billion.