The partnership between the service provider and cloud giant combines Lumen’s secure connectivity services and fiber footprint, with Google’s own Cloud WAN offerings, as well as its Distributed Cloud and global cloud regions.
Service provider giant Lumen Technologies is teaming up with Google to bring new cloud and network connectivity offerings to enterprises in the wake of the AI workload explosion, the two companies announced on Wednesday at Google Next 2025.
The partnership between the two companies will combine Lumen’s secure connectivity services, including its Network as a Service (NaaS) and managed SD-WAN, with Google’s own, brand-new Cloud WAN offering, as well as its Distributed Cloud and global cloud regions.
“Our strategic partnership with Google Cloud marks a significant milestone in our journey to deliver transformative cloud and network solutions … Networks have always been the bedrock of the digital economy, but recent trends are making them more important than ever. AI’s dramatic growth requires more network capacity to help move unprecedented amounts of data across diverse geographic locations. This requires networks to be scalable, elastic and reliable,” Lumen said in a blog post on the expanded partnership with Google.
[Related: AT&T In Talks To Buy Lumen Technologies’ Consumer Fiber Unit Amid Lumen’s AI Push: Report]
Via the new partnership, Google’s new Cloud WAN offering, unveiled at Google Next, will have dedicated fiber access in partnership with Lumen in select locations in 2025 to customer-operated locations such as data centers, branches, warehouses, and airports.
Cloud WAN is Google’s fully managed, secure enterprise connectivity offering that uses Google’s global network. The company said that Google Cloud WAN provides up to 40 percent faster performance compared to the public internet. Cloud WAN gives enterprises high-performance connectivity between geographically dispersed data centers, and it can connect branch and campus environments over the cloud giant’s Premium Tier network, according to Google.
As a result of this combination, Lumen-managed SD-WAN and security services can now be hosted in Google Cloud regions, Lumen said.
“This gives enterprises the ability to leverage Lumen Connectivity Services and the Google Cloud Premium Tier network to spin up virtual [points of presence] POPs on Google, helping increase the speed of deployment for Network-as-a-Service offerings,” Lumen wrote in its blog.
The service provider is further enabling 400 Gbps direct fiber connections from Google Cloud regions directly to customer locations, extending Lumen’s connectivity to more than 50,000 Lumen locations to Google Cloud, the companies said.
Lastly, Lumen is connecting its encrypted WAN to Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped deployments. This use case is ideal for large enterprises, financial services and public sector customers who must meet strict data sovereignty and regulatory requirements, the two companies said.
This offering is designed to meet the U.S. Department of Defense security standards, Lumen said in its blog post.
The company formally known as CenturyLink has previously called 2025 the “year of investment” for Lumen as it continues to cement its place as the trusted network for AI.
The service provider in 2024 inked $8.5 billion in private connectivity fabric deals with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Meta, as well as Google Cloud, Lumen’s CEO Kate Johnson said during the company’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2024 earnings call in February.
Lumen previously revealed that hyperscalers are using Lumen’s network to train AI models. In fact, 30 percent of Lumen’s network utilization in 2022 was generated by hyperscalers. The plan for that percentage is to grow it to 45 percent, according to the company.
“The growth lever of building the backbone for AI represents a huge accretive opportunity for this company. We’re not only driving the strongest utilization of our network assets in the history of the company, we have unmatched capacity for growth at exactly the right time,” Johnson said in February.
