Earlier this month, Zayo Group snapped up tower company Crown Castle's fiber assets.

For Crown Castle, the sale of its fiber and small cells assets to EQT Infrastructure generated $8.5 billion and signaled the company's intention to focus purely as a tower operator in the US.

However, it was Zayo's 50th and largest acquisition since it was founded in 2007.

Crown Castle had put the assets up for sale after launching a review of its fiber assets as part of an agreement with activist investor Elliott Investment Management. The tower company had acquired the fiber assets over a number of years.

Steve Smith, CEO, Zayo Group, told DCD that Zayo saw off competition to successfully snap up the fiber business.

"This was a great set of assets that were inside of a tower company that didn't know how to manage them, and so they wanted to get out of that and go back to be a pure play tower company, which they've done, and the market has really responded positively to," said Smith.

As part of the deal, Digital Bridge-backed Zayo has added approximately 90,000 route miles of fiber to Zayo’s network and increased its overall reach to more than 40,000 on-net locations.

These assets, combined with the company's existing fiber, Zayo's fiber network will span 224,000 route miles across North America and 32 million fiber miles.

Smith notes that Crown Castle's fiber operations are located in desirable metropolitan areas that will help the company support the AI rollout.

"So the thesis for us was the combination of our long haul combined with their metropolitan assets would put us in a very, very good position as AI continues to unfold," said Smith.

"AI initially is all these big training sites that are in the middle of nowhere, where there's power, and then ultimately, when it comes back to the inference, when enterprises start consuming it, enterprises don't exist in the middle of Montana or the middle of Pennsylvania, they're in the big metropolitan areas. So we knew that if we could put these two networks together, it would put us in a very strong position to help facilitate both training and inference as AI continues to unfold."

When pressed on whether Zayo will look to add any more fiber acquisitions, Smith suggests consolidation is likely in the industry, though the company will be "selective" on this over the next couple of years.

Method to the AI madness

As the AI hype continues to go into overdrive, inferencing continues to drive the data center expansion across the US.

Smith compares the AI era to previous technological eras, noting that AI is driving the company's fiber rollout across North America.

"It's hard to overestimate the importance of what's happening here with AI. It's unlike any other technology shift," said Smith, comparing it to the invention of mobile phones, the Internet, and the dot-com bubble.

"When the dot-com blew up, the difference back then was that there was a lot of speculative building, it was telecom-focused, and they were all startups... and when the dot-com blew up, all these companies went out of business, and there was a lot of debt that was put on those companies. Nobody speculatively builds a data center or a new route."

He said the landscape is significantly different now, with the likes of companies such as Nvidia investing so heavily in supporting data centers with its GPUs.

For Zayo, though, the demand to build out more fiber routes continues because of this technology, which Smith calls an "industrial change."

In January of last year, Zayo announced plans to build 5,000 route miles of long-haul fiber across the US to meet the growing demands of AI workloads by 2030. This planned build has since tripled, adds Smith.

"That's [5,000] a lot of route miles in North America. Just a year and a half later, as of May 2026, we are now committed to building 15,000 new and overbuilt route miles," said Smith.

"So that's the amount of demand that has come at just Zayo, and a lot of other players are winning like we are, which has increased the amount of capacity required in the world to accommodate all this AI to traverse the Earth."

In total, Zayo currently has 28 funded or in-progress long-haul routes underway across key AI corridors. This includes 10 new routes and 18 overbuilds.