Before diving deeper into how Connectbase is transforming the way we can buy and sell connectivity, it’s important to understand why that’s so critical to the digital infrastructure industry—and for the customers and communities who depend on us.
A Closer Look at the Movements Behind AI Buildout
AI is being built. In Northern Virginia, one of the world’s largest infrastructure hubs, vacancy fell to half a percent by the end of 2025, and 96 percent of 2026 supply was committed before it existed. The largest hyperscalers—Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta—are spending on the order of 600 to 725 billion USD in 2026 alone, with broader analyst compiles running higher. This movement is widely covered in the industry—the campuses, the clusters, and the capital. It’s also the only movement that behaves like previous infrastructure cycles, which is why the industry’s existing instruments can measure it.
AI has to connect. More than 2,000GW of generation are waiting to interconnect to the American grid—more than the entire installed capacity of the grid it’s waiting to join. A model that can’t reach its users, data, or compute is not a product. Training now spans buildings and metros, stitched together with fiber counts the last era never specified: strand counts leaping from fewer than 200 to up to 432,864 and 6,912 in a single conduit; genuine physical diversity rather than two carriers sharing a railroad right-of-way for ninety miles; deterministic latency; buyer-controlled glass. The people building have started saying this out loud: Clint Heiden, Chief Commercial Officer of EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure, lists the governing constraints of a siting decision as power, connectivity, speed-to-market, and density at scale. Jeff Ivey, who runs data center construction at Hut 8, gives nearly the identical list. Two executives, opposite ends of the market, and both put connectivity and speed alongside power.
