Verizon said on July 24 that it had secured a Google deal worth more than $1 billion, a contract to provide dark fiber connectivity for Google data centers. The announcement gave fresh weight to Verizon's revenue outlook and put a concrete number behind a push the company has been signaling to investors.
Dan Schulman said on Verizon's post-earnings call that more deals are expected to be announced by year end. He said those contracts, taken together, are expected to bring in multiple billions of dollars in revenue over the next several years, a scale that makes the Google agreement look less like a one-off and more like the first piece of a larger buildout.
Dark fiber is capacity that is already laid in the ground but not lit up with electronics, so the customer controls how much of it to activate and how to use it. For data centers, that means dedicated connectivity that can be expanded as traffic grows, without sharing the path with other customers. Verizon did not spell out the length of the Google agreement or the exact locations covered, leaving the main commercial terms of the deal still out of sight.
That gap matters because Verizon put a single deal above $1 billion while also saying the next wave could amount to several billions more over the next several years. The company is asking investors to accept both claims at once: that one contract is already large enough to matter, and that the fuller opportunity is still ahead of it. If the follow-on deals arrive by year end, Schulman's comments suggest Verizon is trying to reset expectations for how much of its growth can come from these arrangements rather than from a single headline agreement.
For now, the Google contract is the clearest proof point. The bigger question is how many more deals Verizon can convert before the calendar turns, and whether the revenue it has described so far is the start of a durable run or just the first public slice of it.
