Amazon Web Services will connect its data centers over Verizon fiber for AI workloads under an agreement Verizon valued at more than $2 billion. Google signed a similar fiber deal with the carrier in July, so AWS is the second of the largest AI infrastructure builders on Verizon’s books.

Verizon disclosed the dark fiber agreement in its third-quarter results Monday morning and described it as a commercial framework for scaling distributed compute behind agentic and generative AI. The earlier Google deal, worth more than $1 billion, also used dark fiber to link data centers, as WebProNews reported at the time .

Where the $4 billion comes from

Verizon sells this work under the name AI Connect, and CEO Dan Schulman told analysts on the earnings call that it has signed almost $4 billion in contracts in six months. Other hyperscalers, neocloud providers and large enterprises are negotiating for dark or lit fiber, he said.…