Fiber Broadband Association
AI + Fiber = The Dawn of the Thinking Economy
For decades, the world’s information economy has thrived with knowledge workers procuring ideas and data, with growth fueled by the deployment of the Internet. Today, nationwide fiber broadband deployment and the rapid buildout of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure are leading to the next evolution in economic development, a Thinking Economy.
Fiber plays the key role of providing the nervous system for the Thinking Economy, the connectivity layer for intelligence to be generated, distributed, and acted upon at scale. Fiber already reaches millions of homes in the United States, with most deployments funded by a combination of private investment and federal support to reach high-cost areas. The Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) expects 90% of U.S. households to have access to fiber within the next five years.
Fiber connects everything together, including IoT sensors and users at the edge, data centers collecting and storing information, and next-generation AI “NeoClouds” performing analysis and inference upon data, as well as transporting results and insights to business, home, and mobile users. The need to connect AI is driving a massive investment into fiber at the data center and middle mile layers, with RVA Market Research LLC estimating the country may need to nearly double fiber route miles from 95,000 to 187,000 by 2029.
The amount of investment into next-generation data centers is expected to run in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year over the next five years, with cloud providers dedicating large amounts of capital towards building large-scale facilities to create ever more powerful AI tools.
Emergence of the Thinking Economy means network operators need to shift beyond the traditional language of residential broadband access, with such terms as homes passed, subscribers, and ARPU, into a broader vocabulary positioning fiber as intelligence-enabling infrastructure. Operators with fiber assets now have expanded opportunities to participate in AI infrastructure, enterprise connectivity, and managed services. As AI demands broaden and AI services proliferate, so will the markets for those services.
As the utility of fiber has grown, so must the mindset of service providers and the larger ecosystem of supporting firms. Network operators treating fiber only as a residential broadband product will be locked out of opportunities to be an embedded infrastructure partner within the AI value chain that connects everything from homes to neoclouds into a unified, seamless ecosystem.
Recognizing the dawn of the Thinking Economy is necessary far beyond the direct fiber broadband ecosystem. Since fiber is critical infrastructure for AI, investors should recognize and evaluate fiber as a long-lived asset class offering multi-generational economic value with recurring revenue potential across multiple markets.
AI drives the increase for fiber and bandwidth by making connectivity more central to computing performance and applications delivery, especially in applications requiring low latency. FBA proposes evaluating fiber network investments based on route diversity, customer mix, rights-of-way depth, and proximity to existing and under construction data center ecosystems, framing fiber as a leveraged position in the growth of AI and the Thinking Economy.
Communities should identify AI infrastructure as multi-dimensional in scope. The FBA recommends communities seeking AI businesses coordinate resource and permitting strategies in a unified economic development portfolio, recognizing that communities and regions deploying enabling infrastructure early capture significant long-term benefits in firms attracted, skills built, and complementary industries established.
Enabling the smooth growth of the Thinking Economy will require policy reforms. Broadband strategy cannot be treated in isolation from energy, permitting, workforce, and innovation policy. All of these come into play when building the connections and neoclouds of the future.
Gary Bolton
President and CEO, Fiber Broadband Association
Gary Bolton serves as president and CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association—the largest trade association dedicated to all-fiber-optic broadband. Prior to FBA, Gary held executive management positions at two successful venture-backed high-tech start-ups as well as at large publicly traded companies in marketing, product line management and public policy. Gary is also currently an adjunct professor in business administration and management science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and he holds an MBA from Duke University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University.
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