dark-fiber
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The Company That Rents the Internet Its Roads - and Just Bought the Traffic Back
Uniti spent a decade as the landlord of a fiber empire. In 2025 it bought its biggest tenant back, and set out to sell strands of glass to the companies building the AI internet.
Zayo Group
Zayo Group is a Denver-based communications infrastructure company that owns and operates one of North America and Europe's largest fiber-optic networks - over 150,000 route miles after its 2026 acquisition of Crown Castle's fiber business. It sells the physical layer of the internet: dark fiber, wavelengths, Ethernet, IP transit, dedicated internet access, colocation and managed edge services to wireless carriers, hyperscalers, enterprises, governments and ISPs. Founded in 2007 on a contrarian bet that bandwidth demand would only explode, Zayo has spent its life buying and building fiber, and is now positioning that network as the backbone for AI workloads moving data between data centers.
Stealth Communications
Stealth Communications is a New York City fiber-optic internet provider that has been quietly digging up Manhattan streets since 1995 to lay its own dark fiber, build its own routers, and sell ultrafast, dedicated business internet to enterprises, schools, broadcasters and government agencies.
Steve Smith
Steve Smith is the Chief Executive Officer of Zayo Group, one of the world's largest independent fiber network and infrastructure companies. A West Point engineering graduate and former eight-year U.S. Army officer, Smith built his reputation scaling Equinix from a $2 billion company to a $34 billion global data center giant over 11 years as CEO. Appointed to lead Zayo in October 2020 after the company went private under EQT and Digital Colony, he is now steering the company through a massive AI-driven infrastructure buildout - securing over $1 billion in AI-related deals in 2024 alone, with a pipeline exceeding $3 billion. Under his leadership, Zayo operates 240,000+ route miles globally and 34 million fiber miles, serving customers across healthcare, finance, media, and enterprise sectors.