Lumen Technologies expanded its US network with a new route connecting Seattle to Minneapolis.

The NorthLine route connects the Pacific Northwest to central markets, specifically targeting emerging data center hubs where fresh power capacity is fueling the rapid growth of AI infrastructure. The route is expected to be live by year-end.

NorthLine will support 100Gbps (100G) and 400G wavelength services. The route will be delivered via Lumen RapidRoutes, a pre-engineered wavelength service designed to reduce provisioning times from months to a 20-day delivery service level agreement. The solution provides connectivity to more than 125 cloud on-ramps, including offerings from vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Oracle.

Lumen touted NorthLine as giving enterprises, cloud providers, and AI firms a “more direct route option between key markets, simplifying architectures and reducing reliance on fragmented, multi-provider infrastructure.”

Lumen CEO Kate Johnson recently told SDxCentral about Lumen's ambitions to host 58 million fiber miles by the end of 2031, which she termed “the largest expansion of the Internet in history.”

“We're investing in data center interconnect in a really, really big way, and inside of metros to ensure that we have 400Gbps, which we believe is table stakes for the AI economy,” Johnson said.

Lumen’s CEO added proximity was key in Lumen’s ambitions, emphasizing last-mile connectivity as "the name of the game.”

“We follow the data center buildout market very closely and have proximity to it, and tend to win a lot of that business because of it,” Johnson said.

Lumen recently snapped up network Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) vendor Alkira in an all-cash deal worth $475 million. The deal will see Lumen integrate Alkira software with its fiber network as it continues ploughing the cloud-to-cloud and data center-interconnect space.

The Alkira acquisition was timed with Lumen's most recent earnings release. Johnson told investors during the earnings call that Lumen's Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform was attracting a significant number of new clients, with more than 20 percent of first-time adopters representing new logos for the firm. Growth was further being driven by existing Lumen customers who also began utilizing the NaaS service for the first time. Lumen claims approximately 2,500 NaaS customers, with more than 30 percent of them being repeat purchasers.

This wasn't enough to stop a nine percent Year-on-Year decrease in revenue, with Lumen pulling in $2.9 billion during the first quarter of its fiscal 2026. Business revenue was also down three percent year over year.