Fiber Before Watts: dark fiber for AI infrastructure and BAAC
Dark Fiber for AI infrastructure starts with power, but power alone cannot keep a data center connected.
As developers secure land, electricity, and cooling for increasingly demanding AI workloads, fiber connectivity needs a place in those early decisions. A site’s ability to support compute depends on its ability to move data between buildings, campuses, and other data centers.
BAAC Innovation’s white paper, Fiber Before Watts, explores why dark fiber planning belongs alongside power and cooling from the beginning.
Plan connectivity around future compute
AI infrastructure changes how developers need to think about network capacity. Planning around building size or rack count alone can overlook the demands of increasingly dense GPU deployments.
The white paper examines how expanding AI clusters can drive significant increases in bandwidth between sites. A fiber strategy that serves the first phase of a campus may leave limited room for the next.
Planning against the future power and compute roadmap helps developers make decisions about routes, strand counts, and conduit capacity before construction begins.
Understand where your routes actually run
Two connections do not necessarily provide two independent paths.
If primary and backup services share a conduit, corridor, or excavation zone, one incident can affect both. Understanding the physical route is therefore an essential part of evaluating resilience.
Fiber Before Watts examines why physical route diversity and control over connectivity infrastructure deserve attention alongside bandwidth.
Build room for expansion
Adding fiber capacity during initial construction can help avoid another civil construction project as demand grows.
The paper explores fiber banking: installing spare fiber strands and providing additional duct capacity as a deliberate reserve for future expansion. It also examines the role of dense wavelength division multiplexing, or DWDM, which increases the capacity carried over existing fiber.
The planning question is how to combine physical infrastructure and optical technology to support multiple stages of growth.
Introducing BAAC’s Neofiber approach
BAAC uses the term Neofiber to describe dark fiber engineered for AI infrastructure, combining high strand counts, low latency, and physically diverse routes over long distances to reach sites selected for their power availability.
This approach brings connectivity into the same planning conversation as the infrastructure it needs to support. Route selection, capacity, and provisions for expansion become early design decisions.
For developers, operators, and infrastructure partners, the message is straightforward: evaluate how a site will connect while evaluating how it will be powered.
Download the full white paper
Explore the capacity planning, route diversity, optical architecture, and infrastructure considerations behind BAAC’s approach.
White paper by Gareth Jones, CEO, BAAC.
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