Sampath Named Zayo CEO
The former Verizon consumer group CEO will take over Sept. 1, 2026
WASHINGTON, July 14, 2026 – Sowmyanarayan Sampath will take over as CEO of Zayo on Sept. 1, 2026, the company announced Tuesday.
Sampath previously spent more than 11 years with Verizon, most recently as the CEO of the carrier’s consumer unit.
Steve Smith, Zayo’s current CEO, will stay on the company’s board of directors after Sampath takes his spot. Smith has led the company for nearly six years.
Zayo is a fiber infrastructure provider, with about 224,000 route miles of fiber spanning the United States. The company recently acquired Crown Castle’s long-haul fiber business for $8.5 billion, which accounts for 90,000 of those route miles and added 40,000 enterprise passings to Zayo’s footprint.
The company said at the time that made it a better competitor amid sky-high demand from AI companies and data centers for fiber connectivity.
Sampath said in a statement he would be continuing down that path.
“As AI workloads, distributed applications, dense GPU clusters, and hyperscale environments change where capacity is needed, and as large enterprises manage increasingly complex connectivity needs, the network is the ultimate constraint, and Zayo is built to solve this,” he said. “We already connect more data centers in the U.S. than anyone else, and that is increasingly important as AI companies and large enterprises look for the scale, reach, and performance AI-driven infrastructure requires.”
Analysts had expected Sampath to take over at Verizon, potentially after CEO Dan Schulman’s contract expires in 2028, and saw his February departure announcement as a surprise. Schulman has been trying to shake up the carrier and compete more fiercely for wireless subscribers.
