Nathan Leamer: Can America Build AI and Rural Broadband at the Same Time?
Meta, Corning, Amazon and REV Fiber are among the companies re-industrializing America
I have had the honor of working alongside the men and women on the front line of American re-industrialization who are building broadband networks and infrastructure.
Tower climbers, fiber crews, splicers, contractors, and small broadband providers turn Washington’s promises to close the digital divide into real connections. They climb towers, pull fiber, bore beneath roads, and reach rural communities that larger networks have too often passed by.
For years, Washington told them a historic wave of broadband construction was coming. Then Washington made them wait for years. In 2021, Congress created the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. But under the Biden administration, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration spent years attaching onerous requirements and political red tape that had little to do with putting infrastructure in the ground.
States battled NTIA over rate regulation and DEI hiring preferences. Virginia’s application was held up for months during a dispute over pricing requirements. Some states proposed spending more than $100,000 per location.
Meanwhile, the world outside Washington kept moving.
Private providers invested billions and connected many communities that had originally been expected to rely on BEAD’s taxpayer funds. By the time the current administration reformed the program through its “Benefit of the Bargain” process, the broadband map of still-unserved locations looked very different.
After years of debate and delay, many of those builders are finally preparing to put billions of federal broadband dollars to work. But just as the largest rural broadband construction effort in American history gets underway, they are discovering that the remaining unserved locations are the hardest to reach geographically, made more challenging by competition for the same materials and workers.
In January, Meta signed a deal worth up to $6 billion for Corning fiber and cable to wire its U.S. data centers. Amazon followed in June with a multibillion-dollar Corning contract of its own and 1,000 new manufacturing jobs in North Carolina. Those deals are good news for American factories. They also arrive just as builders funded by the $42.45 billion BEAD program break ground. REV Fiber broke ground near Baton Rouge this month on what Louisiana officials call the largest BEAD-funded project in the country.
CoBank, a lender to rural utilities and broadband providers, has already sounded the alarm. In July it reported that fiber prices had climbed as much as 50 percent since the start of the year, with the big cloud companies expected to spend more than $700 billion on capital projects in 2026. Some suppliers have delayed shipments or canceled orders because of data center demand.
Smaller rural operators, CoBank warned, may struggle to get materials at reasonable prices. That matters because BEAD grants come with tight budgets, construction deadlines, and Buy America sourcing requirements. Project budgets that made sense even two years ago may no longer be reasonable today, while missing deadlines or requirements could expose recipients to penalties or clawbacks.
That is the problem in front of Washington. The AI build-out and BEAD are both critical to securing America’s future. However, both will draw on the same fiber, utility poles, permit offices and crews on a massive scale in the same few years. Policymakers still talk about them as two projects. On a job site, they are hard to tell apart.
If we are going to finally connect rural America to broadband and win the AI race, we need to make sure BEAD projects still make economic sense – including whether we have enough fiber available and people to install it.
The Fiber Broadband Association and the Power & Communication Contractors Association estimated in 2024 that planned broadband builds would need about 28,000 more construction workers and 30,000 more technicians. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has since projected that the AI build-out will need 140,000 more skilled tradespeople by 2030, heavy equipment operators and construction laborers among them. Those lists overlap. The directional drill operator on a fiber route is who a data center contractor wants to hire next.
And the pay is worth recruiting for. Telecom line installers earned a median of $74,330 in May 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, against $50,980 across all occupations.
This administration already has the right instinct. Its AI Action Plan calls for national efforts to grow the supply of electricians and HVAC technicians for data centers. It doesn't mention the fiber splicers, line crews, and tower technicians who connect those data centers to everyone else. It should.
NTIA has recognized these needs, as well as the need to rescope and rebid some BEAD projects to account for changing maps and economics. Thankfully they have money to do it thanks to the NTIA’s benefit of the bargain round. Its September notice on BEAD's newest deployment round took the first step and, hopefully, subsequent guidance will include funding to train the people who will build and maintain BEAD networks – since that is about as close to deployment as a “non-deployment” dollar, as the leftover funds are labeled, can get.
And Congress is about to take up permitting. On Sept. 30, a bipartisan group led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito introduced the American Affordability and Jobs Act, with a vote expected after the Nov. 3 elections. It is built around energy projects and transmission, down to making data centers pay their own transmission costs. Fair enough, but a data center with power and no fiber is a very expensive warehouse. The fiber routes and towers that carry its traffic, passing rural homes along the way, deserve the same fast track.
The FCC did its part in May, when rules setting timelines for large pole attachment requests and speeding up contractor approvals took effect. Utilities should be held to them consistently.
Left alone, AI and rural broadband could end up bidding against each other for the same spools and the same people, and both will finish late. Nobody wants that outcome, but it is the one we get if we don’t get the policy right.
Nathan Leamer is the CEO of Fixed Gear Strategies, a boutique consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. He previously worked as a policy adviser to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, where he played a key role in developing initiatives to close the digital divide. Previously, he was a senior fellow at the R Street Institute and worked as an aide on Capitol Hill. This Expert Opinion is exclusive to Broadband Breakfast.
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