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Shares of Lumen Technologies (LUMN) are soaring largely due to its partnership with Microsoft (MSFT), among other companies, which will use Lumen to expand and improve its data centers as AI demand continues to surge. Lumen Technologies CEO Kate Johnson joins Market Domination to the partnership and Lumen's AI initiatives.

"Our pivot to growth is really all about networking. We're a networking company. We run a very significant portion of the world's internet traffic on our backbone. And what you've been hearing about in the market is really a massive expansion of our network and the internet at large to start building the infrastructure for the AI economy," Johnson explains. Lumen has partnered with more than 15 different companies, bringing in $5 billion and getting "anointed as the trusted network for AI."

She says that free cash flow will allow Lumen to build a "digital platform to make it super easy, quick, secure, effortless to consume network services." She argues that this moment is the "tip of the spear" in a three-phase process of building out its AI backbone. 

The first phase is hyperscalers, technology companies, cloud companies, all of the companies that build AI models and train them are seeing the proliferation of data, and they're seeing that the internet of yesterday does not serve the AI of tomorrow," she explains. The second phase is focused on enterprises that need more networking capacity for inference models. The third and final phase is when AI is more integrated into everyday lives and data proliferation explodes.

Johnson adds that Lumen's long-term vision is to build "critical infrastructure for decades."

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This post was written by Melanie Riehl