Jul 27, 2026 | Posted by Abdul-Rahman Oladimeji
Verizon has signed a $1 billion dark fibre agreement with Google to connect the hyperscaler's data centres, CEO Dan Schulman confirmed. Speaking during the company's Q2 earnings call, Schulman said Verizon expects to announce additional deals later this year that could generate "multiple billions of dollars" in revenue over the coming years.
Schulman described the Google agreement as a source of "long-duration, high-quality contracted revenue" from one of the world's largest infrastructure customers. During the earnings call, Verizon also confirmed that Schulman has extended his contract as CEO through to the end of 2028. He said the company's fibre network is well positioned to support growing demand from the data centre sector.
"Whether it’s dark or lit, our assets are suddenly in tremendous demand for that data center connectivity," he added. "We have thousands of central offices, many of which we’re taking copper out of, and we are retrofitting them to be remote data centers that are power ready, permitted, fully redundant infrastructure. We did a small trial on that and sold out capability in 24 hours, so we’re seeing large demand for that as well."
Schulman said edge infrastructure will be critical to supporting AI inference workloads requiring ultra-low latency, including robotics, remote surgery, and autonomous driving.
Verizon reported Q2 revenue of $34.25 billion, down 0.7 percent year-on-year, while mobility and broadband service revenue increased 2.8 percent. The company added 550,000 mobility and broadband customers during the quarter, including 184,000 postpaid phone net additions—its strongest second-quarter performance in five years.
