The AI race is on, and community infrastructure is the brand new aggressive edge. Lumen has allotted $100M+ in AI-ready networks to assist world enterprises overcome legacy bottlenecks and speed up innovation. For these trying to keep forward, this implies reworking growing older infrastructure right into a scalable, high-performance spine, prepared for the calls for of real-time AI, cloud, and hybrid workloads. On this submit, we are going to discover how a monetary providers agency might leverage this degree of community funding to reinforce operations, enhance buyer experiences and drive development in an more and more digital world.
Why Infrastructure Issues
Throughout industries, organizations are racing to unlock the total potential of synthetic intelligence (AI). With 85% of enormous enterprises leveraging AI by means of cloud platforms,1 it’s clear that cloud infrastructure is the important thing to creating AI work at scale. It helps companies speed up efficiency, get monetary savings and adapt in actual time. That’s why constructing a future-ready community infrastructure is now a serious a part of any good AI technique.
Think about you’re a worldwide monetary providers firm, underneath the rising stress to maintain tempo with the calls for of contemporary AI. It is advisable to generate real-time insights, practice giant language fashions (LLMs) and handle advanced workloads throughout each cloud and hybrid environments. However your growing older infrastructure is falling behind.
To remain aggressive, you intention to construct a next-generation digital basis able to processing huge quantities of information, enabling superior AI methods and sustaining seamless connectivity throughout world operations. But your community efficiency stays a serious impediment, unable to ship the velocity and scalability that AI purposes require.
The Problem: When AI Innovation Outpaces Infrastructure
As you push ahead along with your AI adoption technique, the cracks in your infrastructure turn out to be not possible to disregard. What ought to have been a leap ahead turns right into a sequence of expensive delays. Right here’s what holds you again:
- Bandwidth provisioning took weeks, stalling essential AI mannequin coaching and inference.
- Cloud entry was unreliable, disrupting real-time information analytics.
- Shifting giant datasets between information facilities induced latency points and downtime.
These points aren’t simply technical. They’ve essential enterprise penalties. Fraud detection slows down. Danger fashions take longer to generate. New digital merchandise are delayed, placing you behind rivals.
As an alternative of driving innovation, your IT groups are caught managing bottlenecks. You want a accomplice who might ship velocity, scale and ease to help your AI ambitions. That’s once you flip to Lumen.
The Breakthrough: Strategic Community Infrastructure in Motion
To beat these challenges, you crew up with Lumen to scale your operations utilizing an AI-ready community infrastructure. The transformation begins in Ashburn, Virginia, the place expanded Lumen community capability offers end-to-end connectivity from enterprise premises to information facilities and cloud environments with velocity and scale.
Provisioning that after took weeks now occurs in close to actual time. You’ll be able to transfer petabytes of information throughout areas, help latency-sensitive purposes and speed up Giant Language Mannequin (LLM) coaching with confidence.
This transformation is powered by a 100M+ Lumen community funding and constructed on a basis that few others can match. Lumen already operates one of many largest and most deeply related networks on the planet. And regardless of working the #1 peered world community,2 Lumen continues to put money into increasing and strengthening its community to remain forward of what’s subsequent.
Determine 1: Lumen Wavelength capability, third-party information facilities and on-net buildings within the Washington, D.C. metro space
Metro Ethernet Upgrades: Intelligence on the Edge
To help real-time processing near the sting the place information is generated, Lumen deployed 100G Ethernet throughout 16 main metro areas. Direct fiber connectivity to over 163,000 on-net buildings and greater than 2,200 third-party information facilities present your agency with quick, dependable entry to cloud, colocation and edge environments, enabling:
- Latency-sensitive use instances like algorithmic buying and selling and fraud detection
- AI pushed real-time portfolio evaluation on the edge
- Hybrid deployments throughout cloud, colocation and edge environments with low latency
Information Middle Enablement: Sensible Muli-Cloud Integration
As your multi-cloud technique expands, Lumen enhancements to greater than 70 third-party information facilities present ultra-fast IP connectivity and 100G Ethernet. This offers you seamless entry to cloud suppliers and platforms, simplified replication and failover, and accelerated AI deployment.
Whether or not syncing compliance information throughout areas or working predictive credit score danger fashions, quick and dependable information motion throughout cloud environments is important in at this time’s monetary panorama. By benefiting from in depth Lumen information middle connectivity, you now have the attain, agility and resilience to help development.
Wavelength Enlargement: Shifting Huge Information at Pace
AI workloads demand high-throughput, low-latency transport. The enlargement of high-speed optical routes by Lumen added 1.26 petabytes of throughput throughout high-demand metro areas. Backed by a spine able to 350 Tbps and speeds as much as 400 Gbps, your enterprise might practice fashions quicker, replicate information with minimal delay and collaborate globally in actual time.
This enlargement couldn’t be timelier. Practically half of North American enterprises say Generative AI is already reshaping their connectivity technique, with one other 32% anticipating it to drive future transformation.3 The Lumen® Wavelength Options upgrades place you to remain forward of this shift.
Actual-Time Management, Actual-Time Outcomes
Lumen® Ethernet On-Demand, a part of its Community-as-a-Service (NaaS) portfolio, provides you dynamic management over bandwidth. Throughout peak buying and selling hours, quarterly reporting cycles or intensive AI workloads, you’ll be able to scale capability inside minutes with out ready on guide provisioning.
This self-service flexibility permits you to reply to unpredictable demand, help real-time collaboration throughout world workplaces and speed up innovation throughout your hybrid cloud technique.
The End result: Constructing an AI-ready Spine
With Lumen, you don’t simply improve your community, you construct a scalable, AI-ready community basis. From edge intelligence to multi-cloud integration, from petabyte scale information motion to agile on-demand bandwidth management, each layer of your infrastructure now works in sync to help AI-driven innovation and enterprise development.
What begins in Ashburn turns into a blueprint for enterprise community transformation to scale innovation. Lumen investments spanning metro Ethernet, information middle enablement and wavelength enlargement are being deployed throughout dozens of markets—creating denser, smarter digital cloth for enterprises in all places.
Discover insights on our Lumen Community Funding web page—together with our newest eBook, Constructing the Community That Powers What’s Subsequent—for a better take a look at the infrastructure, technique and innovation behind our digital transformation engine.
1Gartner, What’s New in Synthetic Intelligence From the 2023 Gartner Hype Cycle™, 2023.
2The Middle for Utilized Web Information Evaluation (CAIDA), AS Rank, January 2025.
3IDC, Future Enterprise Resiliency & Spending Survey Wave 6, June 2024.
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