California Announces Grant Winners With BEAD Final Proposal

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3, 2025 – California announced its tentative grant winners under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program Tuesday evening, the final state to post its bidding results.

The state is looking to use more than $1.5 billion of its $1.8 billion BEAD allocation on deployment projects, a larger proportion than almost any other state. The state also has more BEAD-funded locations than any other, with the total coming to more than 339,000.

California would get nearly 44 percent of those fiber, with another 41 percent in line for low-earth orbit satellite, largely from Amazon’s nascent and recently renamed Leo service. The roughly 15 percent remaining would get fixed wireless.

Should the state’s preliminary result get approved, Amazon would take more than 92,000 locations in the state in exchange for $100 million in grant funding, while SpaceX would serve nearly 46,000 with $63 million in funding.

The three biggest winners in California were Comcast with nearly $400 million, AT&T with $331 million, and Frontier with $248 million. 

Based on draft results, Comcast is in line for the most BEAD money of any ISP nationally, at more than $1.7 billion. SpaceX and Amazon are the top two in terms of locations won, at about 418,000 and 317,000 respectively.

Among all 3.8 million BEAD-funded locations, including California’s, about 64 percent are slated for fiber based on preliminary results. Another 22 percent would get satellite and 10 percent would get fixed wireless.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is already in the process of approving state and territory spending plans under the $42.45 billion program. So far the agency has cleared 26 state plans, and one state, Louisiana, has access to its funding. The approved plans don’t for the most part show significant changes from states’ preliminary results.

NTIA’s grants manager needs to review final proposals, as the documents are called, before state broadband offices can draw down their allocations and fund deployment projects.

California Public Utilities Commission received extensions

The California Public Utilities Commission, which is handling BEAD in the state, received repeated extensions on its final proposal – states were supposed to submit them by Sept. 4, and most did – due to its large number of eligible locations and state-specific legal requirements.

The most recent pushed deadline was actually at NTIA’s request. Ahead of the previous Nov. 14 posting deadline, CPUC said NTIA instructed the state to “delay publishing its Final Proposal for public comment.” 

Neither agency said what the issue was, but states have to clear their final proposals with NTIA before posting them for public comment. The Trump administration has been pushing states to keep as low as possible each project’s per-location cost.

California will take public input on its plan until Dec. 9 before submitting it to NTIA for approval.

NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth said Tuesday that the agency expects that $21 billion in BEAD funding will remain after states and territories finalize their deployment grants. 

It’s not clear what will happen to that cash for the moment, as the NTIA rescinded approval for non-deployment activities when it overhauled BEAD’s rules in June. States had been planning on supporting broadband adoption programs, workforce development, and other things.

“We’re operating under the assumption that the states will get to use their BEAD savings,” Roth said. “But again, nothing has been finalized.”

She said the agency would have “much more to share” on the issue in early 2026. Roth has suggested she would support using the money for permitting reform, but some observers fear Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick would rather claw back the leftover money and return it to the Treasury.