Lightpath announced plans to construct a new long-haul fiber corridor linking Columbus, Ohio and Chicago, Illinois with approximately 392 route miles of infrastructure, including 327 miles of newly built underground multi-conduit fiber across three states. The project marks Lightpath’s first organically developed long-haul route and expands its strategy to support AI infrastructure and hyperscale cloud deployments across major U.S. data center hubs.
The new corridor will connect two rapidly expanding North American data center markets. According to Cushman & Wakefield’s 2024–2025 Global Data Center Market Comparison, Columbus climbed from unranked in 2024 to sixth globally in 2025, while Chicago moved to ninth place. Lightpath said the route will leverage roughly 17% of its existing and recently announced Columbus metro infrastructure, extending its regional network investments into long-haul transport.
The network will incorporate eight LightCube Data Centers, including seven newly planned facilities, providing colocation, optical amplification, interconnection, and power services along the route. Lightpath plans to offer conduit, inter-ducts, multi-count dark fiber, high-capacity wavelength services, and higher-layer connectivity services targeted at hyperscalers, carriers, and enterprise customers. The southern portion of the route between Columbus and South Bend is expected to enter service first, with full route completion targeted for Q4 2028. The company is also evaluating additional in-line optical amplifier sites to increase future transport capacity.
| Lightpath Columbus–Chicago Route | Details |
|---|---|
| Route Length | ~392 route miles (~631 km) |
| New Underground Fiber | 327 miles (~526 km) of new multi-conduit underground fiber |
| States Crossed | Three U.S. states |
| Data Center Facilities | Eight LightCube Data Centers, including seven new facilities |
| Primary Markets Connected | Columbus, Ohio and Chicago, Illinois |
| Target Customers | Hyperscalers, carriers, cloud providers, enterprises |
| Services Planned | Dark fiber, wavelengths, conduit, colocation, Ethernet and higher-stack connectivity |
| Completion Target | Q4 2028 |
| Previous Long-Haul Asset | 323-mile (~520 km) New York–Ashburn 864-count fiber system acquired in 2024 |
“This award marks a significant milestone in Lightpath’s infrastructure strategy,” said Chris Morley, CEO of Lightpath. “The Columbus-to-Chicago corridor reflects sustained hyperscale demand for high-capacity, long-haul fiber built to production-grade standards.”
🌐 Analysis: The announcement highlights a growing shift in AI infrastructure planning toward new regional interconnection corridors beyond traditional Ashburn-centric architectures. Columbus has emerged as a strategic hyperscale market due to lower power costs, available land, and geographic positioning between East Coast and Midwest compute clusters. By directly connecting Columbus and Chicago with owned infrastructure, Lightpath aims to position itself within the expanding AI backbone ecosystem supporting distributed training, inference, and east-west data replication traffic.
🌐 Analysis: The project also reflects broader industry demand for dense, multi-conduit long-haul fiber systems optimized for future optical scaling. As hyperscalers increase deployment of 800G and 1.6 Tbps optical transport, operators increasingly prefer routes with additional conduit capacity, flexible amplification points, and integrated colocation facilities.
