And wow, we got a lot to talk about. If you didn't join our Verizon presentation this morning, Verizon was talking about how they don't want to partner on fiber, they wanna own fiber. And when Sampath said that, I was like, "Well, do you want to buy Frontier?" So apparently, the Wall Street Journal has now reported that Verizon is in advanced talks to buy Frontier. And so much of my questioning for Kenny was premised on trying to, how would Frontier, as an objective goal, be achieved from the Uniti Windstream construct? And so I don't think that that's wrong to go for. But first things first, hot takes. What's your read on this Verizon Frontier thing? How does it, how do you react to it?
I'm not surprised. I've met with a lot of some of the folks in the room today, so they'll back me up on this. I have been saying all morning that I do think that fiber to the home is a space that is gonna be consolidated, and probably consolidated into the ownership of one or two or three parties, and convergence is a theme. I think convergence is a nice thing to have, not a must thing to have, but I think it is a theme that's important to a lot of folks, and with T-Mobile coming into the space, I think that's been somewhat of a flare for some of the other large participants. And so with that said, I'm not, I don't know anything about the rumors.
Mm.
But I'm not surprised to see that.
Give me a multiple over and under. What do you think they get bought for?
I would say that Uniti is worth, you know, somewhere in the high single digit to low double digits today, based on the blend of business that we have. But as we grow that business and turn it into less of a copper-to-fiber conversion and more of a fiber, predominantly fiber business, that business is easily a double-digit multiple business. And, you know, we've been very transparent about our views of the sum of the parts of our business, right?
Mm.
It's out there, it's in our collateral. You can go on our website and see it. It's validated not only by what we're able to get in the ABS market from a leverage point of view. I mean, we can put 10x leverage on our fiber business, not to mention what it's worth.
Mm.
We can put 10 x leverage on it. The same is true in fiber- to- the- home, and there's numerous private market multiples of 15x-20 x+ . So a lot of validation for what we think the intrinsic value of the business is. I can't comment on others, but at least from Uniti's perspective, we think there is a tremendous amount of upside in our intrinsic value versus where we're trading today.
So before we go further, so I should ask, do you want to make any, whatever those kinds of announcements are, like, safe things, safe harbor comments?
No.
No.
All right, we're good.
That's good. All right, and the second thing is, there is a presentation on the Uniti website that it's kinda has summary of a lot of what I think we're gonna talk about here. Third thing is, if you guys-- this is a different kind of format, so if you guys have a question, you wanna, that I'm not getting to, or you wanna deep, dig deeper, raise your hand. We've got a mic, so that we can get our gentleman in the at mic-- 10 o'clock has a mic. So if you guys want to get on the webcast, we can do that. So all right, let's start focusing on Uniti's. I guess I wanna focus on the Uniti- Windstream thing first. So tell me about what Windstream has.
Like, some of these people have, and many people listening may have had access to the NDA. Many people may have read through the merger documents. I won't make you kind of tell the story of how this got done, because that was 20 pages, I think. Tell us where we're starting from Windstream. What are you inheriting as CEO of the new Uniti- Windstream from a fiber- to- the- home business perspective?
So the new combined business will be what we're calling a fiber infrastructure business and a fiber- to- the- home business or Kinetic, and then a managed services business. The fiber- to- the- home business, Kinetic today, is roughly 4.5 million households, with a build, current build plan to get to almost 2 million households. So about 4-
4.3 million total households?
Correct. And a build plan to get to 1.8 million, 1.9 million households today. On a combined basis, we have talked about adding an additional 1 million homes, so-
To the 1.9 .
To the 1.9. So getting to roughly 60% fiber coverage. That is a starting point. We think we can do better than that, but that's what we're talking about now, and that build is fully funded with available liquidity between the two businesses.
Not including BEAD?
Well, that actually does include some assumptions that we're making about how much of the BEAD opportunity we can win.
RDOF.
On a combined basis, it includes RDOF, it includes public-private partnership commitments that have been won, and it includes some additional, what we're calling strategic builds. The ki-
What does that mean?
Meaning non-subsidized builds.
Okay.
The Kinetic footprint is unique relative to a lot of others, in that it's more tier two and tier three market focus.
Mm-hmm.
So smaller markets, less competition, which, if you know Uniti, that's our strategy. Our fiber infrastructure business for years has been focused on building in less competitive markets, with theoretically less upside, but a lot less competition. I think we've proven that strategy to be very successful in our fiber business. We're expanding it to Kinetic, to the fiber- to- the- home story. And I think if you look at the competitive dynamic in Kinetic, Kinetic's markets today, very little overbuilders have come into those markets, and our view is if you build fiber first and early, you have an opportunity to win for the foreseeable future. And I think with our expanded build plan, those competitive dynamics should only improve.
So when you take that and you and combine it with the fiber infrastructure business, I think one of the things that's gonna be unique about the new business is you not only have fiber- to- the- home, but you also have the owned backhaul that's going into those markets, which is unique relative to a lot of the other fiber- to- the- home providers. And so owning that network, soup to nuts, right, all the way to the home, back to the core, is gonna continue to give us a competitive build advantage going forward.
Name some people that you think are doing fiber- to- the- home but don't have fiber to the core, 'cause I struggle to think of any?
I would say... I don't wanna name names, but I would say that if you consider companies that own IRU fiber or they're buying lit capacity back to the core, that's not the same as actually owning that backhaul outright like we do.
Okay.
Now, the very large RBOCs do, but beyond that, very few do.
Mm-hmm. Okay. So that's, that I think goes to one of the parts of the question. So we put out a note this morning, kind of looking at the IRR analysis of fiber- to- the- home. I was with the two CEOs of Dycom last week, you know, looking at what it takes to build in rural markets. So there were two things that were interesting to me. One is that it is possible for rural markets to be cheaper. But one of the numbers I came away with was that it takes about $10 a ft to install fiber. That doesn't include what it takes to get there.
That's at $650 a home pass, which is the number you're throwing out. It implies that homes are 65 ft apart wherever you're doing this.
Mm-hmm.
I struggle to understand that. Can you convince me $650 is a real number? Because no one has that number.
I agree that that is a number that's better than others.
The best number I've ever heard.
It is not a manufactured number. There's not a lot of footnotes that go with that number. It's a real number. And two, two of the things that people miss, when they see that number is, number one, over the past 10 years, Windstream has built a lot of fiber- to- the- node. So from the core out to the node, before you get to that last mile, and back to what I was saying earlier about owning that backhaul, that investment, you know, $500 million+ investment over the past 10 years, has pushed fiber way out into the network. And if you look at the cost of building fiber- to- the- home, backhaul is roughly 20% of it. And I haven't read your report, but, it's probably-
I didn't even guess. No.
It's roughly 20% of building, so historically, Windstream has already made that investment. Now, that is the Uniti network that's now being recombined with Kinetic with this transaction, that investment's been pushed out to the node. That's number one. Number two, Windstream, unlike a lot of others, builds over 90% of their own fiber-
Right
... in Kinetic, and we estimate that to be another roughly 20%-30% savings relative to outsourcing to contractors. So put those two things together, plus, it's generally a little bit cheaper to build in more rural markets. I can tell you from experience, it's a lot cheaper to build in Panama City or Mobile, Alabama, than it is Chicago or New York City, right? So putting all those things together, that $650 is a legitimate number. It's not manufactured, it's a legitimate number.
So that's not a Windstream number that you inherited, that's a Kenny Gunderman number that he endorses?
That, that's a number that we believe in at Uniti, yeah.
So another piece of this I wanted to understand was, you are, I think, the only company that has proactively chosen to insource building out your fiber network, and I've seen how complicated this can be and how far-flung it can be. And then, after you've built the network, then you gotta go back to all these far-flung places to drop the drop wire, and those drop wires can be a long ways away. How does this decision work for Windstream, and no one else has chosen the Windstream path?
So I, I've seen both sides of it, right? I see Kinetic building 90% + in-house, and at Uniti today, like a lot of fiber companies, we build roughly 20% in-house and outsource the rest.
Mm-hmm.
It works to build 20%-30% in-house because you've got the crews you need to build strategic routes that have to get done on time, where you need to move more quickly or you need to be able to control it. That also gives you the ability to keep contractors honest, right? You know what build costs are, and you've got the ability to use that-
But these are unionized build costs.
But I think on the Kinetic side, and frankly, building fiber in general with internal crews, the key is to keep them utilized 99% of the time. They're not traveling around, they're not spending a day or two days a week traveling. They're spending five days a week working and building, and if you keep them fully utilized, the economics work. And that's what Kinetic is demonstrating. Again, the $650 number is a real number for that reason. In a world where the constraint on building at Kinetic, especially on a combined basis, the constraint is not going to be capital.
It's not going to be the number of market opportunities, because we think they're expansive, like markets that actually could generate terrific demographics for us to build fiber- to- the- home. The limiting factor is human capital. It's being able to put people on the ground and get it built. So Windstream rightly made the decision two years ago, three years ago, to build out this internal build engine so that they weren't competing with others for contracting resources. They weren't worried about as worried about the inflationary environment for labor. And today, I think we're benefiting from that, and we're going to benefit from that over the next couple or three years as we complete the majority of this build.
At some point, when the majority of that build is complete and you're starting to get into more of a status quo period.
Mm.
then do you really want to own 90% of your build capacity? Probably not. You probably flex back down to 20% or 30% internal and the rest outsourced.
Mm.
But having that capacity today has been a terrific resource.
I mean, the reason why I'm interested is 'cause, again, you didn't read the report. You've made that clear. But what we did is, every $100 can increase the IRR of a project in fiber- to- the- home by 1%, with the midpoint kind of being around 14%, was our math. And but the more important variable is penetration. And you put out a slide on related to our conference. It's kind of in the last third or so of the deck, and What it says shows us the one-year cohort penetration kind of running 15%-20%, the two-year cohort penetration running roughly closer to 25%-30%.
Mm-hmm.
But you didn't put the third-year cohort penetration or the fourth-year cohort penetration, because I don't know how substantive those numbers are, but could you throw some numbers out, like, what you think penetration could look like for Windstream?
I think-
Because there's an affordability question here, too, and all these other things.
There is, but I would say the latter cohorts at Windstream, at Kinetic are better than the early cohorts, and I would say materially better. One of the things to keep in mind at Kinetic is because Windstream had pushed fiber out to the node over the past seven or eight years, DSL speeds, and therefore DSL penetration at Kinetic is higher than the peers. So if you and you can go compare it. I won't give numbers, but if you went and compared it, you would see DSL penetration is higher as a result. So going into a new fiber market or a new market where you're building fiber- to- the- home, and you have DSL speeds of 100+ meg-
Mm.
It's going to be harder to capture initial penetration than if you have 25 meg. So getting into some of these first markets that have that 100 meg speed, you're going to get less penetration initially, but over time, you're going to capture it. Secondly, and Windstream's talked about this, but I think the initial a lot of the initial markets, the go-to-market was probably more like an ILEC go-to-market than it is an insurgent share taker go-to-market. And as they've applied more, you know, more digitally focused boots on the ground, proactive marketing, so true insurgent go-to-market marketing strategies, those early penetrations have been higher than those early cohorts.
And so now there's an opportunity to not only do that on a go-forward basis in all new markets, but also go back in some of those early cohorts and get those penetration levels up, which I think is a nice opportunity for us.
All right, so I don't want to go down this fiber- to- the- home rabbit hole too much further, unless people want to go deeper. But the next thing I wanted to talk about with respect to the Uniti-Windstream merger was the strategic optionality that it kind of presents. On the one hand, you know, we've spent a year waiting for Frontier to come up with their strategic plan-
Mm-hmm.
or Crown Castle to come up with their strategic plan, and we don't even know, well, obviously, we might know what the end game here for Frontier is. But, you know, we've been wondering, like, it takes a long time to come up with strategic plans. This deal is not intended to close until the second half of 2025 . So my question is, are you spending the next year coming up with a plan that you're going to implement right away, or are we going to have to wait until the second half of 2026 to figure out what it is that Uniti wants to be when it grows up?
I always giggle a little bit when companies talk about initiating a strategic review because I think, Aren't you supposed to be doing that every single day-
Mm
... right, with your assets? And that that's honestly our mindset, and if you read the proxy, read the background information, you can see that we've been extremely active and engaged with the M&A market over the past three or four years at Uniti and even at Windstream. And part of that's because that's just our mentality. You know, we think that we should constantly be assessing-
I think you're a banker or something.
We should be constantly assessing. I tell people I never knew how bad of a banker I was until I wasn't a banker anymore, but we're constantly assessing, you know, where are we going to get the better value, in the public markets, private markets? Are there other ways to optimize our value? I think that our strategic roadmap is to constantly evaluate that. I think historically, we have felt undervalued. You and I have talked about that many times, but I think on a go-forward basis, you know, I feel very confident that we have a story to tell to the market that's now understandable, whereas selling a unique MLA relationship was challenging, selling fiber- to- the- home to the public markets is understandable.
Selling fiber infrastructure to the public markets is understandable, and I'm excited to tell that story, and I think we're gonna get a fair valuation, but if we don't, we're gonna evaluate whether these assets should fit somewhere else, and we absolutely believe one of the reasons for doing this transaction, bringing these valuable assets together under one umbrella, is that it gives us a lot more optionality to pursue options beyond just the public market.
So I think that we'll explore this a little bit more, but I think that you've come out and said that the managed services business is kind of something that's not mission-critical. Could you explain what is the managed services business, and what makes it non-mission-critical, and what is it worth?
Yeah, so I think that last one got me. Our fiber infrastructure business, our strategy there, inclusive of Kinetic, is to own our underlying network and sell simple products: Ethernet, Internet, DIA, dark fiber, waves. And any products that support those are okay, but we like to keep our product set simple. The Windstream managed services business is a cloud-based enterprise business, so UCaaS, SASE, SD-WAN. A good business, but it's more technology-driven, it's more product-driven than it is connectivity.
Is it more organic-developed stuff, or is it more resale?
But it's a little bit of both, but it's a good business. The core cloud-based products are growing, growing at a nice clip. There's also a TDM part of that business that's tailing off, and so when you look at it from 30,000 feet, you see a top-line declining business, but a lot of that's because TDM is tailing off, intentionally so. And by the end of this year, going into next year, most of that TDM business will be gone. So what you're largely gonna be left with is strategic cloud-based, a strategic cloud-based product business, largely off net, so it's not on an owned network. And so, as a result, complicated products, largely off net, not core to our fiber infrastructure strategy, but it's not a bad business.
In fact, it's a very good business, and it's very strategic to other cloud-based enterprise providers. And so-
What makes it good? Its growth rate, its margin, its cash flow?
Its growth, its product set, its blue-chip customer base, the fact that it's a scale business, you know, it's close to $1 billion of revenue. It moves the needle for large strategics who are also in that business. And so it, it's a business that top line's declining, EBITDA is flat to growing, very little CapEx associated with it, so it is not dilutive to our business. In fact, it's cash flow accretive to our business, but it's not consistent with our strategy, and so I think it's going to be a source of capital on a go-forward basis, as opposed to not.
For the sake of argument, it sounds like I'm one for one today, by the way. It sounds like Lumen, right, would be the natural strategic fit for that, but, you know, and maybe this changes, like, their multiple has gone up a whole turn and a bit, you know, in the last six weeks.
Mm-hmm
... for reasons that I want to explore with you also. But how, like-
Yeah, I won't speculate openly about who, where we think the right home for that business-
Privately later.
Could privately later, yes.
Yeah.
Don't wanna speculate about that openly. I do think that, again, it's a good business. It's not dilutive to our business today.
Mm-hmm.
It's cash flow accretive, but there could be a different home for it, and we're gonna lean into that.
I'll just push back a little bit on that, which is, you know, like, we'll have AT&T here, you know, tomorrow, and they've got - 10% growth in their enterprise business.
Mm-hmm.
They say it's in part related to the fact that they've chosen not to be in this fancy schmancy solutions-based business because it's a lot of wholesale, and it's very hard to buy these products and keep the people, and if you organically develop them, the shelf life is very short. So it's just not a good business. So AT&T says it's not a good business, and they've been in this business for a 100 years, and they're the market share leader. You say it's good. Are you sure?
Well, well, first of all, there's a lot of apples and oranges-
Mm
... when people are comparing enterprise businesses. So take, for example, Uniti's enterprise business today. That business is growing at 15% a year. It's on net. It's in roughly 30 metro markets where we have an expansive, dense fiber network. We have boots on the ground. We're selling very simple products: Ethernet, DIA, dark fiber. Our market share in our markets is maybe 5%, 6%. So yeah, AT&T is large, has a lot of market share. We're small, have very little market share. We're taking market share, right? Those are important things to point out.
Mm.
Number two, our business is not weighed down by legacy products. We don't have a lot of, frankly, have no SONET-based TDM business in our enterprise business. A lot of legacy enterprise businesses from the larger telcos, and frankly, some of the fiber businesses do have those legacy services, which are declining and therefore offset growth. So growth is hidden within enterprise businesses that have those declining legacy products. We don't have that. And on a combined basis with Windstream. Oh, and thirdly, enterprise is a small part of our business. So today, it represents less than 5% of all of Uniti's business. On a combined basis with Windstream, enterprise will be less than 20% of our business, and legacy services will also be less than 20% of our business.
You don't have those. It's not the tail wagging the dog, number one, and number two, you don't have legacy products weighing it down. I think just be careful, and I'm not talking to you, but just be careful not to compare apples and oranges or apples and bowling balls. I think we can. I think what-
Is that a famous Arkansas saying?
I've got a million of them, so.
Okay, good.
Um-
Feel free to share.
No. Uh.
So I was asking this question of Crown Castle earlier today about, you know, the need to keep certain businesses together. Do we need to have enterprise and small cell to be the same business? Could they be separate? Could they be worth more to different people? And the answer was, everybody's got a different opinion about that. And I've got one. But with respect to this business, there was a moment in time when there was a third party, and I think it was apparent from your disclosures in your, I guess, S-4, I guess, is the document, where there was a thought that maybe what we do is we take the enterprise business and move it over here and give it to an enterprise services company. They're the best players to do that.
That there's a separate kind of fiber- to- the- home business, and there's a certain value proposition to that that's unique to the fiber- to- the- home setup. So you've kind of expressed more of a middling version, which is like, well, there's this fancy enterprise services business that we don't want to be in, but we do want to be in the second, third tier enterprise services business, and we want to marry that to our fiber- to- the- home business, and that gives us some owners' economics in terms of lowering our cost to build. Is that absolutely the strategy, or could we kind of parse that apart a little bit?
I think other than the middling comment, I think you generally have it right. I think there's-
Middling, I'm so sorry.
I think there's a lot of synergy to the strategy of focusing on tier two markets in fiber, whether it's residential or enterprise or wholesale. That's our strategy, right? We're selling wholesale on unique tier two to tier two inner-city routes. We're selling enterprise in unique tier two metro markets, and with Kinetic, they're selling fiber in unique tier two residential markets. Building fiber first or early with unique routes, unique markets, you have a right to win many years into the future. There's a lot of synergy to owning the backhaul, soup to nuts, for fiber- to- the- home business. I think economically, it proves itself in the build costs, and you control that customer experience.
And I, and I've said this publicly, but some of our biggest customers on the wholesale side over the past few years have been fiber- to- the- home companies buying backhaul from us. So back to your earlier point, they own, they have backhaul, but they've bought it from us and others. So there is synergy there, but at the same time, there is also potentially a different strategic home for some of these assets, if you think about just the world purely from an M&A point of view. I'm not, we're not, we're not unaware of that. And one of the things I remind folks of is, if you read the S-4 and the background information and all the activity, virtually none of those options that we've pursued historically or that have been presented to us historically are off the table.
In fact, one of the reasons for doing this transaction is bringing all these assets together, having it under a single roof, removing some of the historically unnatural complexity, and now giving us the ability to pursue some of those options or other options from a position of strength.
You know, given all your experience, you know, as a banker, you know, kind of coming into this whole situation and watching this unfold, I think it's been about 10 years now. Do you have some philosophical bright lines, something that you absolutely believe has to be done or something that absolutely cannot be done from a business structure standpoint? Like, you know, people might have an idea, but they're wrong, like, we got to do this. I don't know. I would throw, like, Jay Brown in the small cell business. You know, he might still be proven right, but it was questioned, right? But what do you believe?
I think the only red line I have and my board has is that we want to do what's right for the shareholders. I'm a large-
So adorable.
You're killing me.
Yeah.
I'm a-
I'm trying to get you to loosen up a little bit.
I'm a large shareholder. I think if you include all my equity-
That's a good point.
... I'm a top 10 shareholder in the company, and so over 10 years, you accumulate not only a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but you accumulate a lot of equity, and so there are no sacred cows.
Okay.
under our
That's important
... portfolio. We want what's right. I think, you know, we announced our deal, what? Three months ago, and I can tell you that we've had a rocky period of time with the equity, a lot of volatility, but as a large equity holder, I feel better today about that deal, about the deal than I did when we announced it, because the winds are blowing in our favor. And, you know, when you look at the fiber infrastructure business, there's a lot of buzz and around hyperscalers and the opportunity around hyperscalers. That's real. It's not all AI. That's demand coming from a customer set. It's not about AI, it's about demand coming from a large customer set that's new, it's incremental to the TAM. It's validating of fiber being a mission-critical asset.
And when you look at fiber- to- the- home, the convergence theme is also real. And I don't need to comment on the rumors today. I think that some of the large players, some of the large financial investors in and around this space have validated that model with their smart money.
Mm.
And I feel like that as an Uniti shareholder, we’re going to own, when this deal closes, a lot of super valuable assets. And I think it’s gonna be important for us to not only execute on the business, you know, focus on that first, but execute on the business, put an integration plan in place so that we can execute on the synergies, but also be very proactive around M&A, and that’s what we intend to do.
Let's talk about that AI situation, right? Lumen's coming tomorrow. I'm skeptical. Anna's here. She's less skeptical.
I shouldn't have to look at both of you in the same room. It's, it's intimidating.
And so, like, there is an AI opportunity. It is real. There will eventually, someday, be new data centers that have been built in new places that don't already have connectivity from 100 different players, and there will be one or two players that might be willing to go out and reach out to those players and secure these deals over the next many years. And then, once these AI engines are built, there will be companies, healthcare companies, enterprise companies, that someday might want to eventually access those. They might even build their own data center engines to create their own artificial intelligence engines. But you know, I've got some of your peers say, "100%, it's all what's happening," and then some of your peers say, "No, it's not.
Yeah.
You know, you have to give the whole store away-
Mm-hmm
... to get business from these hyperscale guys who can do business with anyone they choose, and they're gonna choose the lowest possible bidder, and that's not who you wanna be.
Mm-hmm.
So I want to interrogate that just a little bit. Double-click into... The word AI comes up in every single presentation.
Yeah.
But is it really a real part of this story, or is it just could be a part of the story someday?
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle of all that, right? It's company specific, so I won't comment on others. I'll comment on Uniti. At the beginning of this year, we had roughly 10 opportunities with hyperscalers in our funnel, and we now have approaching 100, and that's a big jump for us, so-
What qualifies as an opportunity?
What qualifies as an opportunity is something that has been through costing, pricing, and sales engineering, plus some level of grant of authority within Uniti, so it's actually a structured-
So an RFP-
No
-that you've submitted a bid for?
I think, no, it doesn't have to be an RFP. In fact, most of what we're seeing from hyperscalers is not an RFP. It's more bespoke transactional conversation. So I think that's one of the-
Mm
... the things that I've heard in the discourse that's not accurate, right? We're not out competing for the last dollar in a lot of these transactions. And I don't think that in the business that we've been awarded, it's been based upon price.
Mm.
That, I don't think that's accurate either. I think it's more about where you have network and do you have a proven ability to build on time and on budget. And so yesterday, for example, we publicly announced a transaction that normally we wouldn't announce, but we wanted to start getting out for the market to understand better what these deals look like for us.
Mm.
So we announced a deal with a hyperscaler connecting. It's a new route, it's a new build, connecting Mobile, Alabama, and Montgomery, Alabama. If you know our footprint, that's right in the heart of our footprint, two super strategic markets that otherwise were not connected. We have a hyperscaler as the anchor customer, paying well, paying more than the 5%-10% initial anchor yield that we usually talk about, and we have terrific lease-up potential on top of that. That is a very strategic deal. It's right down the fairway with the anchor lease-up model we've always talked about. It's with a hyperscaler, and yes, they're paying an NRC, and yes, there's a construction element to it, but that doesn't make it a one-off deal. That doesn't make it a bad deal.
That doesn't make it a purely financially driven deal. That makes it a strategic deal with a hyperscaler as the customer. And as I said, I don't know whether they're gonna use that capacity for AI or they're gonna use it for the rest of their business. Because-
Mm
... I think the other thing that the market is fixated on, I think inappropriately, is it's not AI driven. Their hyperscalers' businesses run on the Internet, and their businesses are tethered to eyeballs and clicks in the next app, and it may or may not be AI. And if you listen to what they say publicly, which we do, they say, "We're gonna use this infrastructure for AI, and if we don't, we're gonna use it for something else." So they're not... And they're not. There's greater risks to underinvesting than there is to overinvesting, right? In their words.
Mm.
So, and when you compare the amount of capital that they're spending on an annual basis, $200 billion+ as a group, depending on how you define the group, that dwarfs what the wireless carriers are spending. And so wireless carriers historically have been some of the largest wholesale customers of our business and other fiber businesses. There's a 5x differential in the spend at the hyperscalers versus the wireless carriers, and I don't think that spend is gonna dissipate anytime soon. Now, how much of that materializes into digital infrastructure and fiber still remains to be seen. But net net, my point is, Uniti's future is not tied to the hyperscalers. I mean, they represent 20% of our funnel and a substantially smaller percentage of our overall business.
But if we're smart about it, which I plan to be, as best we can, we can use them as anchor customers on a go-forward basis to help build strategic parts of our network.
Just to clarify, when you say Uniti, do you mean the current Uniti?
The new, current-
Proforma Uniti
... plus new Uniti.
So when we talk about current Uniti, we only got. I'm gonna run out of time.
That's intentional.
I know. You, thanks for your answers. The 2Q MRR production from Uniti was, I think, tied with 4Q 2022 as the best quarter you've had. You know, guys like Digital Realty had their best ever quarter in first quarter of 2024. They said that half of that was related to AI. You know, that's them. But, is what we just talked about a piece of what is driving the $1.1 million of incremental MRR that you-
Yeah, yes.
You gotten?
Yes. So frankly, our first quarter was probably the biggest quarter of new business we've had, but you didn't see it because some of the deals don't get reflected in bookings, just because of the nature of the deal.
Okay.
In the second quarter, 40% of our bookings were coming from hyperscalers. Not AI, hyperscalers, you know-
Cloud is a different thing than AI, but we get it, yeah.
Yeah. So, yes, on a go-forward basis, we've also been cautious to say, "Don't expect those types of quarters every quarter. These deals are lumpy." I do think, however, that once you get past this intelligence, building out intelligence phase for the hyperscalers, the deals are gonna be less lumpy, and you're gonna get into the inference phase, where you're gonna see more of an MRR impact to fiber businesses, including fiber- to- home businesses, by the way, 'cause that's where having that 1 Gb connection is gonna give you the ability to access all of the learnings that are being put in place now. So we've tried to caution, don't expect these lumpy deals every quarter, and the time will come where you'll start to see it in MRR.
I guess, I've only got 30 seconds left. Just can you give us the latest on the kind of regulatory process closing the merger? We've got Andy Litman coming up next, our regulatory legislative guru. We can ask him what's going on, but your take on what's happening.
Well, Andy knows as well. I should wait to hear what he says. But we told the
Oh, Jesus.
We told him-
You didn't tell him you could talk about that.
We told the market second half of 2025 to close. I think we're increasingly of the view that's a conservative point of view. We're not ready to change that, but we think it's conservative. We've gotten seven of the 18 PUCs, PUC approvals and counting. We haven't heard any negative feedback, and so we're feeling like we're on track.
Yeah, that's great. Congratulations. Thanks, Kenny.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Good to see you again.
Thanks.
I will read that report. I just haven't had a chance to, so. Thank you.
All right. Thank you, everybody. Andy Litman is next. We got a 10-minute break. Yeah, we're doing-