Digital Realty's LAX12 Landing Station Targets 2028 Launch for Asia-Pacific Traffic

Landing station inside colocation campus eliminates separate backhaul step

Digital Realty and Assured Communications are developing a carrier-neutral submarine cable landing station inside Digital Realty's LAX12 data center in El Segundo, California. The facility is designed to terminate Asia-Pacific subsea cables starting in 2028, positioning landing infrastructure directly alongside colocation, carrier, cloud, and interconnection services.

The operational change matters for buyers sourcing trans-Pacific connectivity in Los Angeles: terminating cables inside a data-center campus removes the need to backhaul traffic from a standalone cable landing station to a separate interconnection facility. Customers should be able to connect more directly to carriers, cloud providers, network exchanges, and other colocation tenants without adding a second point of failure or a second facility lease.

Neither company has disclosed the number of fiber pairs the station will support, total Tbps capacity, construction cost, committed customers, or named cable systems. Those omissions make this a meaningful infrastructure-location development but not yet a quantified capacity expansion. Buyers cannot assign resiliency value to the project until Digital Realty publishes firm cable-readiness dates, committed carriers, protected terrestrial backhaul, restoration arrangements, and pricing.

Direct competition with Equinix and standalone landing operators

The move places Digital Realty in direct competition with Equinix, which operates carrier-neutral data centers and promotes subsea-cable termination and cross-connect capabilities, as well as standalone landing-station operators and regional neutral interconnection hubs. The competitive advantage depends entirely on whether Digital Realty can deliver lower latency, simpler contracts, or lower combined colocation-plus-landing costs than existing alternatives.

For procurement teams, LAX12 represents a future route-diversity and interconnection option, not an immediately available service. The station does not yet justify replacing existing diverse routes. Buyers should require independently diverse landing sites and terrestrial paths through 2028 and treat LAX12 as a potential third or fourth route once cable commitments and capacity figures are public.

SUBCO targets 24,000 kilometers across Indo-Pacific with 2029 launch

Australian digital-infrastructure operator SUBCO has announced plans for three subsea systems totaling 24,000 kilometers, with connections among Australia, Japan, Guam, the United States, Singapore, and Indonesia. Each system is planned with 24 fiber pairs. The named systems include APX North, a roughly 9,500-kilometer Sydney–Japan route via Guam, plus APX East-2 and APX West.

SUBCO is targeting Contract in Force status by early 2027 and operational launch in 2029. These are planned milestones, not completed deployments. SUBCO's broader target is more than 40,000 kilometers of subsea fiber across the Indo-Pacific over slightly more than three years.

The program competes with established and planned systems operated or backed by Google, Meta, NEC, SubCom, Southern Cross, Telstra, and regional consortiums. SUBCO's potential differentiator is route diversity through Guam and multiple Asian landing points, but no system-level lit capacity or enterprise pricing has been disclosed.

What multinational buyers should verify before contracting

Multinational companies with Australia–Asia or Australia–U.S. traffic should view SUBCO's program as a possible future alternative to concentrated routes through Singapore, Japan, or existing trans-Pacific systems. It is not a near-term procurement substitute. Buyers need to verify financing, permits, construction contracts, landing-station access, and whether capacity will be sold as wavelengths, spectrum, or managed services before treating SUBCO as a credible backup route.

The market is moving toward integrated landing-station-plus-data-center campuses and additional Indo-Pacific route diversity, but the most important commercial figures—usable Tbps, committed operators, lease prices, and service-level guarantees—remain undisclosed for both developments. For current budgets, treat both as pipeline options and continue funding geographically diverse live routes. For 2027–2029 planning, include competitive bids from Digital Realty, Equinix, incumbent subsea consortia, and regional carriers once firm capacity and delivery commitments emerge.