Data centers and your local internet provider have one thing in common: they both need fiber – and lots of it. But is there enough to go around?
When $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (or, BEAD) Program was passed into law in 2021, it was hailed as an unprecedented undertaking. The program’s goal is simple: close the digital divide in the U.S. by bringing broadband to everyone who needs it. Of course doing so requires a LOT of fiber – an estimated 500,000 miles to be exact.
BEAD was always going to take a while to get off the ground. But delays and rule rewrites from the government have dragged the process out even longer than expected and nearly five years later no ground has been broken on BEAD projects.
Any other time this might have mattered less. But the whole BEAD situation has collided with the rise of AI over the past three years. AI has driven a data center boom, which, like BEAD requires a whole lot of fiber – both for transport of data between data centers and between servers within data centers. Again, we’re talking nearly 100,000 route miles here.
That got us wondering – is there enough to go around? We asked Mike O’Day, SVP and GM for Optical Communications at fiber vendor Corning and Jeff Heynen, who is VP and broadband specialist at Dell’Oro Group, to weigh in.
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This podcast is written and hosted by Diana Goovaerts. It is edited by Diana Goovaerts and Matt Rickman. Liz Coyne is our executive producer. Special thanks to contributing writer and host Masha Abarinova and guests Jeff Heynen and Mike O'Day.
To learn more about the topics in this episode:
- Here's how big the fiber shortage really is
- Fiber vendors strategize for huge demand from AI in 2026
- Data centers will need 92000 miles of new fiber
- Corning faces supply crunch from high optical demand
- Microsoft preps cloud for AI with Corning, Heraeus hollow core fiber deal
- The U.S. needs 58k more workers to deploy broadband
- BEAD may be a big disappointment, but fiber demand from AI is hot, hot, hot
- AI demands 5x more fiber in the data center
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