AT&T Paying $5.75 Billion for Lumen’s Consumer Fiber Business

WASHINGTON, May 21, 2025 – Lumen agreed to sell its consumer fiber business to AT&T for $5.75 billion in cash, the companies announced Wednesday.

The acquisition would add about 1.1 million fiber subscribers and 4.3 million passings to AT&T’s footprint. With the extra infrastructure, AT&T said it was setting a new goal of 60 million fiber passings by the end of 2030, up from 50 million. 

The carrier counted 29.5 million fiber passings at the end of the first quarter.

“As we advance our fiber build, we’ll serve more communities with world-class connectivity and expect to roughly double where AT&T Fiber is available by the end of 2030,” AT&T CEO John Stankey said in a statement.

Lumen said the deal would let the company focus on its enterprise customers. The provider inked $8.5 billion in deals last year with companies looking to up their connectivity for data-hungry artificial intelligence tools.

“We are sharpening our focus on enterprise customers, and this transaction enhances our financial flexibility, enabling us to reimagine networking for enterprises in a multi-cloud, AI-first world,” Kate Johnson, Lumen president and CEO, said in a statement.

Lumen, based in Monroe, La., is keeping the fiber backbone infrastructure that powers those deals, plus its legacy copper footprint, which counts about 17.7 million passings serving 1.3 million residential subscribers.

The companies said the transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2026.

AT&T said that after closing, it would look to find a partner to co-invest in the Lumen assets, and eventually spin them off as an open-access network with AT&T as the anchor tenant. It’s a similar structure to Gigapower, AT&T’s joint venture with BlackRock, on which the carrier is also the anchor tenant.

The major 5G providers have each been buying up assets in a bid to expand their wireline footprints as far as possible and offer bundled fixed and mobile broadband, which keeps customers around longer. Cable giant Charter Communications announced last week plans to pay $34.5 billion for Cox Communications, the largest private cable firm in the country, with similar intentions of expanding its mobile service across the footprint.

Verizon recently got FCC approval for  its $20 billion deal to acquire Frontier Communications, and T-Mobile closed its deal to buy Lumos with investment firm EQT last month. T-Mobile’s purchases of regional fiber provider Metronet and UScellular, the regional wireless carrier, are still pending.