Fiber giant Zayo has struck a debt restructuring deal with creditors holding over 95% of its debt, providing the firm with financial flexibility to continue its network expansions.

The agreement, which extends its repayment deadlines to 2030, will enable the DigitalBridge-owned company to focus on building out 5,000 fiber route miles while integrating an additional 90,000 miles through its $4.5 billion acquisition of Crown Castle’s fiber assets.

Zayo now plans to kickstart a series of exchange offers to swap existing debt instruments for new ones with better terms. CFO Jeff Noto said the move will improve the firm’s financial position and “support our ability to meet the accelerating demand for critical fiber infrastructure in the AI age.”

“With flexibility to pursue future alternative sources of financing, such as asset-backed securitization and project financing, we’ll be better able to invest in network growth and support our customers’ growing connectivity needs,” Noto added.

Zayo’s fiber network currently covers some 19.1 million miles and 147,000 route miles, supporting carriers, cloud providers, and data centers with their connectivity needs.

The Boulder, Colorado-based firm, however, is mirroring its parent company’s view of taking advantage of the AI boom. DigitalBridge's recent earnings call revealed it expects some $43 billion in capex investments across its portfolio by the end of 2026 – with $50-plus billion earmarked for data center projects alone “over the next few years.”

Zayo is looking to get in on the need for fiber to fuel AI, with the company’s CPO, Bill Long, recently telling SDxCentral’s sister title DCD that AI is the key focus for the infrastructure provider.

“There's an opportunity around AI training. It's connectivity to large training data centers that is manifesting itself,” Long said.

“Data centers are going where there's available power. So it's not where data centers used to be placed, which was proximate to major metros, but it's going to wherever the power is, which happens to be proximate to our long-haul network.”

Among Zayo’s ongoing AI-focused infrastructure projects are three long-haul dark fiber routes, connecting markets like Chicago to Columbus and Phoenix to Tucson, which feature ultra-high fiber counts. In addition, the firm completed a full 400G upgrade of its North American core network earlier this year, adding 393.6 Tb/s of optical capacity as well as 10 additional 400G-enabled Points of Presence.

Zayo's CFO, upon announcing the company's debt restructuring, echoed the CPO's comments regarding its AI initiatives. Noto commented: "We are making important progress executing on our strategic plans and positioning Zayo as a leader in delivering purpose-built long-haul routes that are critical to the next generation of AI-enabled technologies."

Zayo’s network expansion also looks to add to its plan to boost connections at the macro edge, such as connecting data centers in metropolitan areas.

"We hypothesize that the macro edge will be the place where infrastructure consolidates," Long said. "We think that's where, as AI takes off, that's the design pattern for inferencing and for where interconnection and cloud interconnection is going to happen."