- Optimum said Lightpath fiber revenue jumped 35% in Q4 and contract value reached $362 million in 2025
- Lightpath’s contracts resemble Lumen’s AI deals, according to New Street Research analyst Vikash Harlalka
- Harlalka said Lightpath is one of Optimum’s “few growth businesses” given the company’s broadband losses and heavy debt load
Optimum, formerly Altice USA, noted hyperscaler fiber demand fueled Q4 2025 revenue growth for Lightpath, its enterprise fiber arm.
Speaking on Thursday’s earnings call, Optimum CFO Marc Sirota said Lightpath revenue jumped 35% year-over-year due to “nonrecurring revenues from and deliveries of services to large hyperscale customers, as well as recurring revenue growth from continued positive net installations.”
Lightpath, jointly owned by Optimum and Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, counts over 10,000 unique fiber route miles serving more than 15,000 locations, including those owned by AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle.
AI-related contracts for Lightpath totaled $362 million in 2025, Sirota said, which is a 40% increase from the $110 million in contracts awarded in 2024. He didn’t comment on the specifics around the contracts but noted “there is a large opportunity still out there for us to capture with the funnel.”
“I would say the team is firing on all cylinders as far as construction and really getting those networks turned up,” he said.
All told, year-end 2025 revenue for Lightpath totaled $468 million. Lightpath’s increased contract value and revenue is a bright spot for Optimum given its struggling broadband business. The operator in Q4 lost 62,000 broadband subscribers, a sharp uptick from the 39,000 losses in Q4 2024.
“Lightpath is one of the few growth businesses in the Optimum portfolio,” said New Street Research analyst Vikash Harlalka in a note to investors. He thinks the Lightpath contracts are similar to those for Lumen’s Private Connectivity Fabric, which now amassed nearly $13 billion in deals.
Considering how bullish Optimum is about Lightpath’s growth, Harlalka said the lack of details around the contracts is “a missed opportunity” to give investors a better understanding of how they will improve the company’s financials.
“When Lumen announced the first batch of their PCF contracts, their management went to great lengths to help the investor community understand how the accounting and the cash flow of these contracts work,” he wrote. “This helped the street model out the economics of the contracts with much more precision than they could have on their own.”
Optimum is still drowning in debt, with executives on the call stressing the need for a “meaningful debt reduction and reset of the balance sheet.”
Consolidated net debt for 2025 totaled about $25.3 million. To tackle future loan payments, Optimum in Q4 received $2 billion in financing from JP Morgan as well as another $1.1 billion in January to refinance a loan backed by some of its HFC network assets (also known as asset-backed securitization).
But what New Street found peculiar was Optimum didn’t provide EBITDA guidance for 2026. The company said it drove down operating expenses by nearly $60 million year-over-year in 2025, which will pave the way for “strategic investments” in 2026.
Optimum didn’t elaborate on what those strategic investments might be, “but we suspect these investments will offset any potential cost cuts implemented in 2026,” Harlalka said, which may impact EBITDA guidance.