Trading on Air: How Hollow-Core Fiber is Rewiring Wall Street and AI

CHICAGO and ORLANDO – November 02, 2026 — For decades, the fundamental speed limit of the global digital economy has been dictated by a simple piece of physics: light travels roughly 30 percent slower through solid glass than it does through a vacuum. In industries where fortunes are made and lost in microseconds, this physical speed bump—the propagation delay inherent to conventional silica fiber—has been an unavoidable tax.

That tax is finally being repealed. McKay Brothers and Relativity Networks announced today a commercial partnership to deploy ChronoCore anti-resonant hollow-core fiber across key financial corridors in New Jersey, with plans for subsequent national expansion. The initiative will offer dedicated fiber pairs and connectivity services ranging from 10 to 400 Gbps, delivering data through microscopic tunnels of air rather than solid glass.

The result is a transmission speed approximately 47 percent faster than standard single-mode fiber, effectively slashing network latency by 32 percent over the same physical distance. But while the immediate beneficiaries are the high-frequency trading firms jockeying for position in New Jersey’s financial data centers, the broader implications of this deployment point toward a massive restructuring of how and where artificial intelligence infrastructure is built.

The High-Speed Arms Race in New Jersey

The initial battleground for this deployment is the hyper-competitive triangle of financial market venues in New Jersey. This region houses the critical nervous system of U.S. equities and derivatives trading, including Equinix’s NY4 facility in Secaucus, Nasdaq’s primary hub in Mahwah, and the NYSE Euronext data center in Carteret.

In this ecosystem, proximity is power. Market makers and algorithmic traders spend billions optimizing their network paths to shave fractional microseconds off their execution times. By replacing the glass core of traditional fiber with an air core, light signals can travel at approximately 3.4 microseconds per kilometer, compared to the standard 5 microseconds per kilometer.

"We have worked with successive generations of hollow-core fiber for nearly a decade. Relativity offers the best technical solution we have evaluated for the networks we want to build," said Tim Boyle, Chief Operating Officer of McKay Brothers. "For critical U.S. market infrastructure, IP provenance and security of supply matter alongside performance."

McKay’s approach to this deployment is particularly disruptive because of its equal-access business model. Rather than leasing exclusive, proprietary links to a single mega-bank or hedge fund, the company offers long-term indefeasible rights of use (IRUs) and bandwidth services to any willing buyer. This effectively democratizes the latency advantage, forcing trading firms to compete on the efficiency of their algorithms rather than the exclusive physics of their physical connections.

Furthermore, the low chromatic dispersion of the ChronoCore fiber allows for more capacity and longer reach with fewer active optical components. By reducing the need for intermediate signal regeneration, the network design lowers power consumption and real estate requirements, stripping out hardware that traditionally introduces microscopic, yet critical, delays.

AI at the Edge: Solving the Power and Latency Bottleneck

While Wall Street provides the initial capital and use case for hollow-core fiber, the technology’s most profound impact may lie in the rapidly expanding footprint of artificial intelligence.

The AI industry is currently colliding with a severe macroeconomic reality: the power grid cannot support the density of compute required in major urban centers. Hyperscale data center operators and AI developers are increasingly forced to build their massive GPU clusters in remote, suburban, or rural areas where electricity—particularly renewable energy—is abundant and land is cheap.

However, distributing AI workloads across geographically separated campuses introduces a severe latency penalty. Real-time AI inference and synchronized model training require near-instantaneous data transfer. If the compute nodes are too far apart, the propagation delay of traditional glass fiber bottlenecks the entire system, leaving expensive GPUs sitting idle while waiting for data to arrive.

Hollow-core fiber acts as a geographic equalizer. By increasing the speed of data transmission by 47 percent, network architects can push data centers significantly further away from urban hubs without violating strict latency budgets. Optical engineers note that this technology effectively extends the viable radius for a synchronized data center cluster from 60 kilometers to 90 kilometers. In densely populated, power-constrained regions like the PJM interconnection market (covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland), expanding that radius opens up more than double the potential real estate for new AI factories.

"The intersection of power availability and real estate determines where compute gets built," Boyle added. "Our aim is to connect more of those locations to the existing financial ecosystem. That means more choice about where customers access live data and run applications, including AI inference, while improving synchronicity between market centers."

From Lab to Long-Haul: Commercializing Air-Core Optics

The concept of guiding light through air is not new. Photonic bandgap fibers have existed in laboratories for over two decades. However, early iterations were plagued by high signal loss (attenuation), narrow transmission bandwidths, and extreme fragility that made them impossible to splice or deploy in real-world environments.

The commercial viability of the McKay and Relativity deployment hinges on recent breakthroughs in anti-resonant hollow-core fiber (AR-HCF) design and industrial-scale manufacturing. Relativity Networks, leaning on a robust U.S. patent portfolio, has engineered a fiber that minimizes the interaction between the light and the glass microstructure holding the air core.

More importantly, Relativity has partnered with Prysmian, a global titan in cable manufacturing, to move the technology out of the lab and into mass production. Prysmian has successfully scaled the extrusion and cabling of this fiber at its facilities, proving that the delicate microstructures can survive the brutal realities of outside plant deployment. Recent high-density cable tests demonstrated that ChronoCore cables can be reliably jetted into standard conduits at speeds up to 350 feet per minute, utilizing proprietary couplers to achieve low-loss connections with existing single-mode infrastructure.

"McKay brings nearly a decade of experience putting hollow-core fiber to work in demanding environments, from data centers and outside plant to towers and integrated fiber-wireless networks," said Jason Eichenholz, Founder and CEO of Relativity Networks. "That experience spans the routes and real estate needed to build and operate networks. That makes McKay the right partner to develop this opportunity with us and serve the growing infrastructure needs of AI inference."

Reshaping the Physics of Infrastructure

Despite the technical triumphs, hollow-core fiber is not poised to replace the billions of miles of conventional silica fiber blanketing the globe. The manufacturing complexity means that AR-HCF currently commands a steep price premium—often five to ten times more per meter than standard single-mode fiber like SMF-28.

Traditional Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) solutions will remain the standard for pure capacity plays, multiplexing hundreds of wavelengths over cheap glass to move massive volumes of asynchronous data. But DWDM cannot change the speed of light. For synchronous AI training, real-time algorithmic trading, and edge inference, the raw propagation speed of the medium is the only metric that matters.

In these high-stakes arenas, the cost premium of hollow-core fiber is easily justified by the return on investment. A few microseconds saved in a New Jersey trading hub can translate to millions in captured arbitrage. Similarly, the ability to site a massive AI data center in a region with cheap, available power—without sacrificing the latency required to connect it to urban end-users—fundamentally alters the economics of cloud infrastructure.

The partnership between McKay Brothers and Relativity Networks marks a critical inflection point. As hollow-core fiber moves from bespoke, point-to-point trading links into broader commercial availability, it is redefining the physical constraints of digital infrastructure, proving that when the speed of glass is no longer enough, the future of the internet will be built on air.