Summary
- Narwhal 1 would connect Galway with Long Island, while Narwhal 2 would link southern Ireland with New Jersey.
- MDM puts combined investment at $500m and is working on permits and marine survey procurement.
- The systems would connect with MDM's wider Ireland-Europe and Ireland-UK cable programme, strengthening Ireland's role as a transatlantic junction.
MDM is developing two new transatlantic subsea fibre systems between Ireland and the United States, with a combined planned investment of $500 million and provisional service dates beginning in 2029.
Narwhal 1 is planned between MDM’s existing cable landing infrastructure in Galway and Long Island, New York. Narwhal 2 would connect a new landing station in southern Ireland with New Jersey, creating two additional Atlantic routes rather than concentrating the investment on a single landing pair.
MDM said permit work is under way and procurement has begun for marine surveys. Narwhal 1 has a provisional ready-for-service date in the third quarter of 2029, while Narwhal 2 is expected to follow in 2030.
The projects are being funded through private equity and industry partner involvement. Their value to Ireland also depends on onward connections: MDM intends the Narwhal systems to interconnect with several other cables being developed from Ireland towards mainland Europe and the UK.
Ireland becomes a junction rather than an endpoint
Those planned connections include the Pisces system from Galway towards Spain, France, and Portugal, a separate route from Galway towards Norway, and multiple Ireland-UK systems. The architecture would allow transatlantic traffic landing in Ireland to move onwards without depending exclusively on traditional routes through Britain.
That has commercial and resilience implications for Ireland’s data centre market. Dublin already hosts a concentrated digital infrastructure cluster, but subsea routes determine how efficiently operators, cloud platforms, content networks, and enterprises can move traffic between Irish facilities, continental Europe, Britain, and North America.
DataCentral previously examined how Ireland is bringing subsea cable security and connectivity into its wider cloud and digital infrastructure policy. Additional routes can add capacity, but route diversity, landing-station resilience, repair arrangements, and physical separation are at least as important as raw fibre count.
Narwhal 1 and Narwhal 2 are still development projects rather than operating systems. Marine surveys will determine viable routes around seabed conditions, other infrastructure, fishing grounds, environmental constraints, and coastal approaches. Permitting then has to be secured across the relevant jurisdictions before manufacture and installation can proceed.
Data centre growth depends on cable diversity
Power availability has dominated recent debate around Ireland’s data centres, but connectivity remains the other essential utility. A data centre can have sufficient electrical capacity and cooling plant yet still be commercially constrained if its network routes cannot provide the latency, resilience, and capacity required by customers.
The Atlantic is already crossed by multiple high-capacity systems, including hyperscaler-backed infrastructure. MDM is pursuing a model in which Ireland itself becomes the interchange point between North America, mainland Europe, Britain, and the Nordics.
The company has experience managing subsea projects from route development and environmental assessment through installation and operations. Its Irish portfolio includes work on IRIS, the cable linking Iceland and Ireland, while Pisces has received European support as a direct Ireland-mainland Europe connectivity project.
The timing also places the Narwhal systems into a period when resilience is receiving closer regulatory attention. Damage to subsea communications and energy infrastructure has pushed route security, monitoring, repair capacity, and geographic diversity higher on European policy agendas.
Two distinct US landings can help reduce common-mode risk, but the extent of the resilience benefit will depend on the final routes and whether they remain physically separated through coastal approaches and onward terrestrial networks. Multiple cables that converge on the same ducts, landing stations, or metropolitan fibre corridors can still share failure points.
MDM’s current target leaves several years before service. During that period it must complete surveys, secure permits, finalise commercial partners, procure cable and installation capacity, and coordinate the landing infrastructure at both ends of the Atlantic.
If delivered alongside Pisces and MDM’s other planned European systems, the Narwhal pair would give Ireland a broader role in the physical network beneath cloud and data centre growth. The country’s digital infrastructure position would rest not only on the facilities built onshore, but on how many genuinely independent routes can carry their traffic across the Atlantic and onward into Europe.
