Not a Field of Dreams: Infrastructure Leaders Talk Buildout Strategy

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland, May 5, 2025 – A state broadband official, a fiber executive, and a data center operator spoke Monday about making tough decisions behind where and how to invest in digital infrastructure.

For state officials like Chandler Vaughan, associate director at the Virginia Office of Broadband, the calculus starts with public funding.

Vaughn’s team manages a $2 billion portfolio aimed at connecting roughly half a million homes. So far, Virginia has delivered service to 150,000 locations and is actively building to another 200,000. The final 133,000 homes are slated to be connected under the state’s forthcoming Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program.

“When we score applications, what we're looking for is how well they designed this network,” Vaughn said, but also: “What's the cost efficiency of it? What's the request of dollars from the state for that ask? What are they bringing to the table in terms of match dollars? What are the long term commitments to affordability?”  

“It’s a number of things, but primarily what it boils down to is cost efficiency and what they’re coming to us and requesting funding for,” Vaughn said.

For Vishal Dixit, chief strategy officer at Frontier Communications, private investment in fiber is a high-stakes gamble. The company, which emerged from bankruptcy in 2021 with an aggressive fiber deployment strategy, was now building out to 1.3 million locations per year.

“These are very capital-intensive assets,” Dixit said. “So the critical factor before you even make the investment is: How secure is our return?”

“We take three factors into account,” Dixit said. “The first is market structure… the second is diversity of customers… the third is contract length and certainty of return.”

“It’s a blend of hard science in terms of the returns, but also a bit of subjective operational optimization, ensuring we have diversity of build,” Dixit added.

Scaling and timing for secondary and tertiary market

For Scott Willis, CEO of DartPoints, the decisions come down to scale and timing. His company builds data centers in secondary and tertiary markets — places where enterprise demand is rising but where hyperscalers aren’t likely to invest.

Moderator Andrew Lipman, partner at Morgan Lewis, pressed him on that strategy, asking, “I assume this is not a Field of Dreams approach, right?” — referencing the famous line, “If you build it, he will come.”

Willis was quick to shut that down. “Let me kill that thesis. Investors aren’t into ‘build it and they will come.’ If you find one, let me know,” he said.

Instead, DartPoints was focused on building right-sized infrastructure where demand already exists or is imminently arriving.

“We’re right-sizing our investment — power, space, the whole asset class — to support the actual need we see on the ground,” Willis answered.

DartPoints targets mid-sized cities across the Midwest, Southeast, and South Central U.S., betting on the growing demand for edge computing. 

“If you believe in the thesis of data distribution — I happen to — then those workloads are moving closer to the edge,” he said. “And we’re trying to position our assets right where that demand is headed.”