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To Support AI Workloads, Microsoft Taps Lumen for Network Boost
With AI workloads demanding more from its datacenters, Microsoft is looking to outside partners for infrastructure support.
The company this week unveiled a deal with enterprise networking provider Lumen Technologies aimed at beefing up its Azure datacenter infrastructure, which is being tested in unprecedented ways since the start of the AI gold rush.
"Microsoft has an ambitious vision for AI and this level of innovation requires a network that can make it reality," said Lumen CEO Kate Johnson in an announcement Wednesday. "Lumen's expansive network meets this challenge."
Microsoft is a front-runner in the generative AI space, owing in large part to its robust and early investments in OpenAI, whose technologies are foundational to Microsoft's AI portfolio, from Copilot to the Azure OpenAI service. In return for that support, OpenAI uses Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure to build and train its various AI models, including ChatGPT.
However, with hundreds of millions of users across both ChatGPT and Microsoft's AI solutions, that infrastructure is being pushed to new limits.
To keep up with demand, Microsoft has spent billions to build new datacenters and retrofit existing ones. In addition, last month, it inked a deal with erstwhile rival Oracle that allows the former to borrow cloud capacity from the latter.
Similarly, the Lumen deal will allow Microsoft to tap into Lumen's network technologies to help it support the massive growth of AI workloads in its cloud.
Lumen, which counts Zoom and Amazon Web Services among its customers, offers over 6 million miles of fiber-optic cables via its Private Connectivity Fabric solution, as well as dedicated network access, under 5 milliseconds of latency at the edge, and 60 percent more capacity compared to legacy fiber.
"This AI-ready infrastructure will strengthen the connectivity capabilities between Microsoft's datacenters by providing the network capacity, performance, stability and speed that customers need as data demands increase," the announcement said.
The deal is not one-sided; Lumen benefits, too. The networking giant plans to phase out its legacy systems and move to Microsoft's cloud, a project that has the potential to improve Lumen's cash flow by about $20 million over the next year.
Per the two companies, "Lumen will migrate and modernize its workloads to Microsoft Azure, use Microsoft Entra solutions to safeguard access and prevent identity attacks and partner with Microsoft to create and deliver new telecom industry-specific solutions."
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.