Verizon CEO Dan Schulman remains “excited” on the AI infrastructure opportunity, hinting that the carrier has signed up tenants for many of its decommissioned central offices where they can take advantage of the power and connectivity of those locations to run inference and edge computing services.

Schulman’s tease was during a conversation at this week’s Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, where the executive noted Verizon is “fortunate” to be in the “right place at the right time to be a part of one of the greatest capital expenditure things around AI infrastructure that we've ever seen in our generation.”

“It opens up a quite large [total] addressable market for us. It's growing quite rapidly, and we have the right assets in place and experience to take advantage of it,” Schulman said of this “insatiable” market demand.

Schulman explained that Verizon position is in “connecting data centers together to provide even greater compute” where there “is absolutely the need for dark fiber connectivity” and where “we have a lot of dark fiber capability.” Verizon recently enhanced this capability through a multi-year fiber supply agreement with Corning.

“Fiber is in short supply … and we have now got a full supply of that,” Schulman said of that deal. “It's a good one for both our companies, but it enables us to do all the build that we need to without being supply constrained because the demand for that interconnectivity is quite large, and we'll continue to build on that drumbeat of announcements that we had.”

This builds on Verizon’s recent $1 billion deal with Google to supply dark fiber capacity linking the hyperscaler’s data centers.

Schulman also teased upcoming announcements would include support for inference computing at edge locations in support of applications like robotics, gaming, autonomous driving, and remote surgery. Verizon’s support angle comes from the ongoing decommissioning of thousands of copper-stuffed central offices that used to support legacy telecom services.

“We're already signing up deals where people are coming in … we'll talk about some of those at our next earnings call, but that ability to take advantage of what were decommissioned central offices and now can be inference, edge computing, is tremendous as well,” Schulman said of that opportunity. “It just opens up a brand new vector of growth for us on top of a growing connectivity business. We'll be more and more specific about that, but you'll start to see revenues, and noticeable revenues, beginning next year on that.”

Schulman’s self-education on satellite physics continues

Schulman also continued to tout his continued self-education around “the physics of satellite” and what that has taught him about its competitive potential.

“The more I dive into the physics of satellite, and I'm deep into the physics of satellite because I want to understand it inside and out, the more convinced I am, whether it be broadband to the home or direct-to-device, that satellite is a complementary service, and even over the medium to long term, not a direct competitor,” Schulman said. “They just can't compete without a terrestrial network in urban and suburban, where, call it 95 to 98% of our revenues are, we're 100-times, in some cases 1,000-times, more efficient than they are.”

Those comments built on Schulman’s lessons earlier this year at a different investor conference regarding the inferiority of satellite-based broadband services. They also come under the increasing spotlight of cash-rich satellite broadband SpaceX hinting at entering the mobile telecommunications space through its Starlink operations.

Schulman maintained his ongoing stance that there was a place for satellite as a “partner” but “I do not see it as a viable competitor in the medium and even longer term.”

If anything, Verizon is looking to bolster its own competitive pressure against satellite-based broadband efforts. Schulman hinted that the carrier was looking to do more “interesting experimentation” with its spectrum licenses to support more capacity on its network, specifically tied to expanding fixed-wireless access (FWA) services.

“Everything from low band up to millimeter wave, in which I think has the potential to unleash a lot more capacity for us,” Schulman said of this experimentation. “It's early days, I'm not going to talk a lot about that right now, but I think we'll have a ton of room and capacity on FWA.”