Exa Infrastructure to Deploy 6,552 km Transatlantic Subsea Cable Linking US and UK by 2029

Exa Infrastructure has announced plans to build a new transatlantic subsea cable system connecting the United States and the United Kingdom, a project the company says will be the first transatlantic cable constructed by a single operator in a decade. The new system, named Exa Meridian, underscores the growing urgency among hyperscalers and large enterprises to secure sufficient fibre capacity ahead of an anticipated surge in transatlantic data traffic driven by AI workloads, cloud computing and content delivery.

The Exa Meridian cable will span 6,552 kilometres between New Jersey in the United States and Brean in the United Kingdom, delivering more than 500Tbps of capacity across 24 fibre pairs. The system is scheduled to be ready for service by the fourth quarter of 2029. Brean is already a landing point for Exa's existing Express cable, which runs to Halifax in Canada, making the Somerset site an increasingly important hub for transatlantic connectivity.

Meridian will become Exa's ninth transatlantic cable, reinforcing the company's position as one of the largest independent operators of subsea infrastructure across the Atlantic corridor. The announcement comes amid a broader wave of investment in subsea capacity as demand for bandwidth continues to accelerate, with major cloud providers and AI companies increasingly contracting for spectrum and fibre pairs rather than traditional lit capacity.

"Demand across the Atlantic is changing quickly. The largest customers are increasingly planning in spectrum and fibre pairs, and the capacity they will need towards the end of the decade has to be built now," said Jim Fagan, CEO of Exa Infrastructure. "With a Ready For Service date set for 2029, Exa Meridian will be the only cable with sufficient capacity to satisfy these large-scale demands."

The project reflects a wider industry trend in which subsea cable developers are racing to bring new transatlantic routes online to meet the requirements of AI-driven data centres and cloud infrastructure. As hyperscalers expand their global footprints, the availability of high-capacity, low-latency subsea links has become a critical factor in site selection and network architecture planning, particularly for facilities along the US East Coast and in Western Europe.