Summary
- EXA Meridian will connect New Jersey and Brean over a 6,552km subsea route.
- The system is designed with 24 fibre pairs and more than 500Tbps of scalable capacity.
- Ready for service is targeted for the fourth quarter of 2029.
EXA Infrastructure has launched plans for a 6,552km transatlantic subsea cable connecting New Jersey with Brean in Somerset.
EXA Meridian is being designed with 24 fibre pairs and more than 500Tbps of scalable capacity, with ready for service targeted for the fourth quarter of 2029.
The project has reached Contract in Force with subsea systems supplier Xtera, moving it beyond an initial route proposal and into contracted delivery.
Meridian will become the ninth transatlantic cable in EXA’s portfolio.
Large customers are buying deeper into the fibre layer
EXA said demand is increasingly shifting from conventional wavelength purchases towards spectrum and complete fibre pairs among the largest cloud and infrastructure customers.
That gives buyers greater control over the optical equipment used on their allocated capacity and creates a route for future upgrades without relying entirely on managed wavelength services.
The change is partly being driven by the scale of cloud and AI infrastructure on both sides of the Atlantic. Distributed compute estates generate traffic for model training, inference, storage replication, content, cloud services, and movement between data centre regions.
As a result, network capacity is becoming part of the same physical planning problem as powered land and cooling. A large data centre campus still needs diverse fibre routes if its computing capacity is to connect reliably to users and other facilities.
Meridian will land at Brean rather than the more heavily used south-east coast. EXA plans a new cable landing station there with diverse terrestrial routes towards Slough and its wider European backbone.
Route diversity can reduce the exposure created when too many systems rely on the same coastal or terrestrial corridors.
Delivery runs to the end of the decade
The 2029 timetable reflects the long development cycle involved in subsea infrastructure.
Survey work, marine engineering, cable manufacture, landing preparation, permitting, installation vessels, burial, optical equipment, terrestrial connections, and commissioning all have to be completed before a system can carry commercial traffic.
EXA said the project already has anchor commitments from neocloud and hyperscale customers, providing commercial support well before the cable enters service.
The timing also places Meridian alongside a substantial pipeline of European AI and cloud capacity expected to arrive later this decade.
Where those data centres are built will continue to be shaped heavily by electricity. Their usefulness once operating will also depend on whether fibre infrastructure expands quickly enough to connect increasingly large pools of compute across regions.
