Aims to become the world’s first global data utility, pioneering an AI Corridor model that delivers AI to places the legacy carriers skip; Puerto Rico role strong on climate events
Puerto Rico is playing a key role in a global innovation that seeks to make AI more equitable and accessible.
The premise behind the idea originated at Laser Light Holdings is that the way the world moves data is about to become the binding constraint on the AI economy, and that the current model, namely hub-and-spoke networks routing traffic through a handful of enormous data centers, cannot carry it.
The company’s answer is something it calls an AI Corridor, a carrier-neutral stretch of infrastructure combining fiber, edge computing, power and AI compute, distributed along a route rather than concentrated at its endpoints, so that the towns in between get capacity instead of being bypassed.
That model got a financial vote of confidence last week. Laser Light announced on Aug. 27 that it had entered a definitive agreement under which Keystone Optical Network, LLC has committed to invest up to $75 million in the company.
As part of the expansion, Puerto Rico will serve as host of a global weather data collection and analytics pilot program. In a Disaster Supplemental grant proposal to the Economic Development Administration earlier this year, the company committed resources to distribute weather stations to all public schools in Puerto Rico, install optic ground stations to receive high atmosphere data, and link to edge computing micro-data centers.
The move is part of a data collection strategy in Puerto Rico that includes using AI and High-Performance Computing capacity to model the resulting large quantity of data at higher quality with ground analytics before, during and after a climate event. The modeling will allow regional partners in industry, academia and government to apply real time, actionable decision-making as weather events occur.
At a higher level, the AI Corridor model will lean on one Puerto Rico asset known mostly in local tech circles. The island, it turns out, is one of the Caribbean’s densest submarine cable landing points, with ARCOS-1, SAm-1, Americas-II, Antillas I and the St. Maarten-Puerto Rico system all coming ashore in the Hub787 Building. The Isla Verde facility connects the island to the U.S. mainland, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Central America and Brazil. Any serious Caribbean or Latin American data corridor runs through infrastructure Puerto Rico already has.
Laser Light Holdings is headquartered in Hamilton, Bermuda, with U.S. operations in Virginia. The Caribbean deployment, Laser Light Caribe, will be headquartered in Puerto Rico, and plans to employ 40 people as it scales up.
Partners include the Puerto Rico Department of Education and the Department of Commerce and Economic Development. The commitment is not contingent on receiving the funds.
Laser Light Caribe LLC is headed by CEO & President Gail Nolan, long a leader of technology-based development in Puerto Rico, including serving as a relationship officer for Hub787 through the non-profit Puerto Rico 5G Zone she founded in 2020. A certified economic developer who formerly served as chief strategy officer at Invest Puerto Rico, Nolan chairs the infrastructure subcommittee of Puerto Rico’s Aerospace Council. The 5G Zone and sister organization Blockchain Ignition Lab are federal 501(c)(3) and Commonwealth 1101(a) NGOs dedicated to expanding advanced communications research and infrastructure on the island, including the Hub787 connection under a Corporate Cooperative Agreement with 5G Zone.
What Laser Light is building
Laser Light is assembling what it describes as a multi-domain, all-optical platform: terrestrial fiber, subsea cable, edge-data facilities, and eventually a free space optical satellite constellation, operating as a single programmable network rather than as separate systems stitched together.
The satellite piece, called HALO, for High Articulation Laser Optics, traces its architecture to the U.S. Air Force’s Transformational Satellite program and was later validated under a cooperative research and development agreement with government stakeholders.
As designed, HALO would place 8 to 12 satellites in medium Earth orbit carrying 7.2 terabits per second of capacity, using 200-gigabit optical crosslinks between satellites and 100-gigabit optical links to the ground, an approach the company has said is roughly 100 times faster than conventional radio-based satellite downlinks.
Laser Light describes the constellation as planned rather than deployed, and its corporate materials refer to a “future” or “planned” optical layer.
“We have always believed next generation digital infrastructure will require a fundamentally different design, the convergence of advanced optical networking, intelligent orchestration, and global connectivity, to meet the extraordinary demands of AI and the digital economy,” CEO Bob Brumley said in announcing the Keystone commitment. He added that the capital “strengthens our ability to move from vision to execution with greater speed and scale.”
The corridor innovation
In July, Laser Light Communications named Vincent Perez to lead a newly created Global AI Bureau charged with designing and operating its AI corridors. In announcing that appointment, Brumley described the problem the corridors are meant to solve in terms that map directly to Puerto Rico’s situation. “Today’s hub-and-spoke networks cannot support the latency, competition, or sovereignty the AI economy requires,” Brumley said, describing a “community-centered model in which data services are distributed locally and purpose-built to reduce the energy, water and land impacts of large data centers and compute hubs. Communities at the edge of legacy provider networks cannot be left behind in the AI era, because brilliance can come from anywhere when people have the tools to achieve it.”
