Lumen CTO on the fundamental fiber changes required for AI data centers

　　Lumen is building new fiber routes for Meta, which is the service provider's latest move to "reinvent itself as a fiber-rich AI enabler."

　　Lumen CTO Dave Ward told Light Reading that Meta has been a longtime customer of Lumen's, and this latest partnership will support Meta's AI ambitions with additional fiber routes connecting the hyperscaler's data centers. One of Meta's latest AI services is Movie Gen, which uses text inputs to generate videos. Lumen will be building new routes with new fiber made with "extremely high-density cables," added Ward.

　　"As we also announced with Microsoft, we have a deep partnership with [Meta] to build out their AI backbone," said Ward.

　　In July, Lumen announced a two-way partnership with Microsoft to use its cloud for Lumen's digital transformation and underpin Microsoft's network expansion with the service provider's fiber network.

　　Ward said Lumen will utilize fiber from Corning to support its buildout for Meta. In August, Lumen said it would reserve 10% of Corning's global fiber capacity over the next two years for network buildouts to interconnect AI data centers.

　　There are currently over 5,000 data centers in the US and 2,500 are under construction, said Ward. The AI-enabled data centers that Lumen is connecting are the "multi-hundred megawatt and single or multi-gigawatt size," he said.

　　There's a "fundamentally different order of magnitude" of compute power, GPUs and bandwidth required to support AI workloads, explained Ward. "It is the largest expansion of the Internet in our lifetime."

　　Lumen's CTO explained that the company is constructing 130,000 fiber route miles to support both Meta and other customers seeking to interconnect AI-enabled data centers. Fiber conduits, tubing which protects individual fiber strands, in this buildout will contain anywhere from 144 to over 500 fibers to connect multi-gigawatt data centers, said Ward.

　　Lumen is well-positioned to add fiber to existing conduits that the company gained from acquiring Level 3 in 2016, explained Ward. By using the existing extensive network of conduits from Level 3, Lumen can more quickly buildout fiber to support AI data center interconnects.

　　At the end of the day, to support AI workloads in data centers, the type, location and speed of data center interconnects are "orders of magnitude higher than what they were in the past," said Ward.

　　"This isn't 'let's just put more fiber in the ground.' This is actually a fundamental change to the architecture of how Lumen's network is constructed, and, frankly, how the US' Internet is constructed."