To support Lightpath’s fiber growth with data centers, it expects capex to be in the range of $200 million to $300 million. This capital will primarily support construction tied to its recently announced hyperscale contracts.

“Overall, we are taking a disciplined and return-focused approach to growth capital, making strategic investments to support long-term top line performance while retaining flexibility to adjust the pace of investment as operating conditions evolve,” Sirota said.

Lightpath recently secured a second infrastructure tenant on its previously announced underground multi-conduit system fiber build in Eastern Pennsylvania, anchoring the expansion with a leading multinational data center developer and operator and reinforcing the investment case behind the company’s Susquehanna-region network.

The new tenant leverages more than 60% of Lightpath’s combined Eastern Pennsylvania in- process build, underscoring accelerating fiber infrastructure demand in the region.

But its work in Michigan and Pennsylvania is just one of several new deals. Just this week, Lightpath entered the Greater Atlanta metropolitan market, bringing high-capacity Managed Bandwidth services to one of North America's largest data center markets.

Lightpath now offers Atlanta-area customers Wavelength and IP Transit services from 10 Gbps to 800 Gbps per wavelength, with aggregate system capacity scaling into multi-terabit configurations, to meet that demand.

Already operating a long-haul network hub in Atlanta connected to New York, Philadelphia, Ashburn, Chicago, Dallas and Miami, the service provider’s entry into Atlanta complements Lightpath’s national backbone with high-capacity managed connectivity delivered over underground fiber infrastructure to 30 data center campuses in the market.

“Atlanta is one of the fastest-growing data center markets in the country, and demand for high-capacity managed bandwidth continues to accelerate,” said Chris Morley, CEO of Lightpath.

AI drives IP traffic growth

As Lightpath expands its fiber network into new markets like Atlanta and enhances existing markets to support AI, it is seeing IP traffic across its network accelerate.

Over the last 18 months, Lightpath saw IP traffic across its network increase at an annualized rate of 32%, a trend the service provider attributes to enterprise customer AI adoption. Enterprises are leveraging AI and large language model platforms and acting on the results in real time.

Enterprises are engaging in AI inference, a process where a trained artificial intelligence model applies its learned patterns to new, unseen data to make real-time predictions, decisions, or generated outputs.

Unlike model training, which happens inside a handful of large data centers,

What’s different about inference is that it happens wherever the enterprise is: a hospital system querying a diagnostic model, a bank scoring transactions, a university running research workloads.

Lightpath noted the AI traffic growth spans the provider’s diversified enterprise base rather than stemming from any single customer or vertical.

"AI has moved out of the lab and into the everyday operations of enterprises," Morley said. "Hospitals, banks and universities are querying AI platforms in real time and acting on what comes back. Every one of those interactions has to cross a network, and increasingly it crosses ours. Steady, broad-based growth in our IP traffic is one of the clearest signals we have that expected AI-driven bandwidth demand is real."

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