NEW YORK, July 30, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lightpath, an all-fiber, infrastructure-based connectivity provider, today reported that IP traffic across its network has grown at an annualized rate of 32% over the most recent 18 months, as enterprises increasingly leverage artificial intelligence and large language model platforms and act on the results in real time.
The signal comes from inference — the phase in which a trained AI model is put to work generating answers, forecasts and recommendations. Unlike model training, which happens inside a handful of large data centers, inference happens wherever the enterprise is: a hospital system querying a diagnostic model, a bank scoring transactions, a university running research workloads. Each request travels across the network to an AI or large language model platform and back, and as organizations embed these tools in day-to-day decisions, that activity travels across the IP backbone — making network traffic one of the places the shift toward enterprise AI becomes visible.
This 32% annualized growth rate accelerated sharply vs. historical annual growth of 19%, underscoring the impact of accelerating enterprise AI adoption. The growth has been broad-based, spanning Lightpath's diversified enterprise base rather than stemming from any single customer or vertical.
The demand lands on one of the densest metro fiber footprints in the country. Lightpath owns and operates 12,100 route miles of AI-grade fiber across 11 major U.S. metro markets with a leading position in the New York metropolitan market and direct fiber connections into 18,000+ service locations.
“AI has moved out of the lab and into the everyday operations of enterprises,” said Chris Morley, CEO of Lightpath. “Hospitals, banks and universities are querying AI platforms in real time and acting on what comes back. Every one of those interactions has to cross a network, and increasingly it crosses ours. Steady, broad-based growth in our IP traffic is one of the clearest signals we have that expected AI driven bandwidth demand is real.”
Lightpath serves a diversified enterprise base — including customers in healthcare, financial services and education, among the industries adopting AI most actively — rather than depending on any single customer or sector.
“Our enterprise customers are telling us what we already see in the traffic: connectivity to AI and large language model platforms has become mission-critical,” said Doug Turtz, CRO of Lightpath. “These organizations are making decisions on real-time data, and that puts a premium on the dense, high-capacity backbone we operate across the largest U.S. metro markets. It’s why this demand is showing up across our customer base rather than in any single segment.”
As enterprises continue to build AI into how they operate, Lightpath will keep tracking IP traffic as one of the earliest indicators of that shift across the markets it serves.
For more information about Lightpath, visit lightpathfiber.com, and follow Lightpath on LinkedIn.
About Lightpath
Lightpath owns, builds and operates an AI-grade, all-fiber network across major U.S. metro markets, delivering high-capacity, low-latency connectivity for cloud, hyperscale, data center and mission-critical enterprise workloads. Purpose-built for scale and resilience, Lightpath supports dark fiber, wavelength and Ethernet services with direct operational accountability from the teams that design and run the network. For more than 30 years, enterprises, public-sector organizations and cloud providers have trusted Lightpath to support essential systems and large-scale digital infrastructure. Lightpath is jointly owned by Optimum Communications, Inc. (NYSE: OPTU) and Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners.
To learn how Lightpath can connect you to your digital destinations, visit lightpathfiber.com.
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