Hyperscalers are revolutionizing the digital landscape, driven by the exponential growth of data from their cloud services. To meet this demand, these companies have made significant investments in submarine cable networks. Just last year, Meta announced plans to build a private $10 billion, around-the-world submarine cable.

Yet, while hyperscalers excel at building out their undersea infrastructure, they face a critical challenge: connecting these undersea systems to inland data centers.

The hyperscaler-terrestrial challenge

Hyperscalers are creating diverse undersea routes to their data centers to mitigate risks of accidental damage caused by fishing vessels or dragging ship anchors. To support this, new cables are being routed through alternative undersea corridors to different landing stations, enhancing diversity, redundancy, and resilience.

At the same time, they are also expanding their data center footprints, moving from urban hubs to rural, more strategically advantageous locations — a shift largely driven by rising real estate costs, power limitations in cities, and opportunities to leverage cooler climates and renewable energy sources.

However, this creates a new challenge: the need for dedicated, high-performance terrestrial connectivity to bridge their submarine cables and data centers.

Constructing terrestrial networks presents unique hurdles for hyperscalers. In North America, for example, laying a cable from Los Angeles to New York would require navigating a maze of regulatory approvals across states, municipalities, and private lands, each adding more layers to a bureaucratic nightmare of costs and delays. Meanwhile, in regions like Africa and Asia, stringent regulations frequently prevent hyperscalers from building or operating terrestrial networks altogether.

MOFN: a collaborative solution

Largely responsible for building and maintaining critical inland infrastructure, telcos have a longstanding role in providing reliable domestic connectivity, with expertise in navigating complex regulatory landscapes. This has positioned telcos as vital partners in connecting the hyperscalers’ submarine cable networks to terrestrial networks.

Enter Managed Optical Fiber Networks (MOFN), a collaborative business model where hyperscalers partner with telcos for dedicated, high-performance connectivity in regions where they cannot or do not want to own and operate their own terrestrial networks. MOFN has been gaining increased interest and traction as hyperscalers expand operations and seek efficient ways to interconnect their sprawling infrastructure where they cannot—or choose not to—build their own terrestrial networks.

Telcos, with their extensive terrestrial fiber assets including dark fiber, are able to meet these demands. Their dark fiber (unused optical fiber that can be activated for new connections), which hyperscalers can purchase or lease dedicated access to, provides hyperscalers with high-performance bandwidth solutions. In some cases, telcos can deploy additional fiber along existing routes, and construct entirely new infrastructure on behalf of a hyperscaler.

Intelligent networking as a competitive advantage

In a MOFN arrangement, the hyperscalers will have very stringent demands for the networks they use to carry their traffic, pushing telcos to deploy the very latest network technologies and services.

This includes Reconfigurable Line Systems (RLS), which deliver programmability, capacity, and scale, while reducing the network carbon footprint, enabling networks to adapt to the unpredictable traffic requirements of hyperscaler services, such as new services based on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Intelligent AI-driven tools are fast becoming essential for optimizing network management, allowing telcos to enhance performance, predict and resolve potential issues, and manage complex, expansive networks with greater intelligence. AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) plays a particularly vital role for hyperscalers, who rely on adaptive and dynamic networks to support their evolving needs.

In this landscape, technology vendors serve as key facilitators and mediators, aligning the goals of hyperscalers with what the telcos can and should deliver for them. By bridging technical requirements and business objectives, vendors deliver scalable solutions that meet current demands while preparing for future growth, regardless of how unpredictable, to minimize ongoing risk.

This collaborative approach accelerates innovation, with hyperscalers driving performance and expansion needs, telcos showcasing infrastructure capabilities, and vendors positioning the right technologies to create mutually beneficial outcomes.

A golden opportunity for telcos

As hyperscalers drive unprecedented demand for global intercontinental connectivity, telcos have an opportunity to redefine their role in the digital ecosystem. By embracing MOFN, telcos can monetize existing assets, invest in future-ready networks, and establish enduring partnerships with the world’s leading technology companies.

For hyperscalers, it allows them to rapidly acquire required connectivity, overland and undersea, to roll out their cloud services to more customers for increased revenue streams, in a strategic alliance shaping the future of global connectivity.