Speaking on the ‘Wholesale’s Role in Powering the AI Ecosystem’panel at the Global NaaS Event (GNE 2025) in Dallas, Texas, Hulse stressed that without effective collaboration between carriers, cloud providers and infrastructure partners, AI-driven networks risk falling short of their potential.
“When hyperscalers can’t get what they want or are able to actually fulfil their requirements with partners, they will go and do things themselves,” he stated. “So, I think it’s incredibly important that we always think about our strategy and it’s always an evolving strategy.”
As a result, Hulse described the company’s AI Connect Strategy Portfolio as “a collection of products and assets we’ve had and we’ve invested in over time”, which includes a few partnerships with brands including Vultur, offering GPU’s as a service, alongside launching long-haul connectivity between data centres for Amazon Web Services.
Commenting on the AWS partnership, which was announced last week, Hulse said: “We [Verizon] are very excited about this new area of investment for us.
“We traditionally did not play in the space that’s not our core strength, but we now understand the opportunity and where we have assets. We’re going to make opportunistic investments in the future to make sure we’re playing in this AI connected ecosystem.”
Reflecting on Verizon’s infrastructure investments, Hulse reminisced about the launch of the company’s biggest construction project in the United States, where it covered the top 69 US markets with dense fibre in order to have as many of its macro cell sites on that.
He described that investment as a “competitive advantage,” adding that it has positioned Verizon well for the AI era.
“It just so happens that the industry is now looking for distributed, dense fibre networks in these metros,” he said. “So this is a great corner case for how we ultimately take the investments we put out there and monetise them in the AI ecosystem.”
Hulse, who is also a member of The Global Leaders Forum (GLF), highlighted the importance of industry collaboration, emphasising that realising these opportunities requires a cohesive global approach.
“We can’t be everything to everybody,” he said. We have to pick our lane, be very good at it, and then ultimately try to scale and partner with each other so that we can really connect this whole global ecosystem and really hit every area of the stack,” he said.
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