Digital Realty's Los Angeles Cable Landing Station Adds Pacific Route Option for 2028

Digital Realty integrates subsea access with Los Angeles colocation

Digital Realty and Assured Communications are developing a cable landing station at Digital Realty's LAX12 data center in Los Angeles, designed to connect subsea cable systems directly to terrestrial networks and carrier-neutral colocation. The facility is expected to support cable landings beginning in 2028.

The project's key differentiator is physical integration. Today, subsea cables typically land at dedicated facilities, requiring separate contracts for backhaul to a data center and interconnection services. Digital Realty's model places landing infrastructure, power systems, and colocation on the same campus, potentially eliminating handoffs between a cable landing site, transport provider, and data center.

For enterprise buyers planning AI, cloud, or disaster-recovery architectures across the Pacific, this represents a future route-diversity option, not available capacity today. The announcement provides no pricing, committed cable operators, capacity figures, or service-level agreements. Procurement teams should treat this as pipeline infrastructure and avoid assigning cost savings or capacity assumptions until landing dates, participating operators, power availability, and interconnection pricing are published.

Digital Realty's move strengthens its position against Equinix, CyrusOne, and CoreSite, which also compete for subsea-adjacent colocation traffic. It also adds to existing Los Angeles cable-landing facilities, where enterprise buyers already face choices among multiple landing sites, backhaul providers, and interconnection platforms.

Subco announces three 24-fiber-pair Asia-Pacific systems for 2029

Australian operator Subco announced three planned subsea systems—APX North, APX East-2, and APX West—aimed at increasing Asia-Pacific capacity and route diversity. All three systems are designed with 24 fiber pairs and are expected to be completed by 2029.

- APX North: Approximately 9,500 km, connecting Sydney to Japan via Guam. - APX East-2: Approximately 10,000 km, connecting Guam to Los Angeles. - APX West: Approximately 4,600 km, connecting Perth to Singapore, with branches to Jakarta and Batam.

The primary value is route diversity, not headline capacity. Enterprises operating across Australia, Southeast Asia, Japan, and the United States could gain alternatives to routes concentrated around Singapore, Guam, and the U.S. West Coast, reducing single-point-of-failure risk for active-active cloud regions and backup connectivity.

The projects compete with existing and planned Pacific routes, including AWS's planned 420-Tbps Sta'O'Nuk cable between Japan and Washington State, also scheduled for 2029 and using 20 fiber pairs. However, Subco's announcement does not state total system throughput, lit capacity, pricing, landing-party commitments, or firm construction milestones. Buyers should classify these as pipeline infrastructure and avoid assuming they will lower WAN costs before commercial service and capacity-allocation details are released.

Verizon secures 80 million fiber miles from Corning through 2032

Verizon and Corning signed a multiyear, multibillion-dollar agreement covering more than 80 million miles—approximately 130 million kilometers—of high-density optical fiber from 2027 through 2032. The agreement supports Verizon's planned AI Connect network strategy and its target of 40–50 million broadband fiber-to-the-premises passings for homes and offices.

The scale of the commitment gives Verizon a stronger supply position against carriers building AI interconnection networks, including AT&T, Lumen, and Zayo, as well as hyperscaler-controlled networks from AWS, Microsoft, and Google. It also reinforces Corning's role as a major optical-fiber supplier competing with Prysmian and Furukawa Electric.

For enterprise buyers, the agreement signals continued capital intensity in long-haul fiber and suggests that bandwidth between major data-center markets will remain a strategic bottleneck for AI workloads. Buyers should expect more carrier proposals for high-capacity, low-latency inter-data-center connectivity, but the deal does not disclose Verizon's customer pricing, route-by-route capacity, latency guarantees, or enterprise service launch dates. It is a strong infrastructure-supply signal rather than evidence of immediately available services.

Telxius deploys Nokia 800G coherent pluggables across terrestrial routes

Telxius, Telefónica's subsea-network business, is deploying Nokia's ICE-X 800G coherent pluggable optics across terrestrial infrastructure linking Europe, the United States, and Latin America. The Nokia optic supports 800 Gb/s transmission over distances exceeding 1,056 miles (1,700 km). In a related demonstration over the BRUSA subsea system, the technology delivered 400 Gb/s per wavelength across more than 5,600 km.

Coherent pluggable optics place high-capacity optical transmission closer to routers, potentially reducing the need for dedicated optical transport equipment. Carriers can add capacity using pluggable optics in existing routing environments rather than building an entirely separate optical layer.

The approach competes with conventional transponders and other coherent-pluggable platforms from Ciena, Cisco, and Infinera. For enterprise buyers, the shift could improve carrier flexibility to add capacity on existing routes without requiring major infrastructure refreshes, potentially shortening service delivery timelines for high-bandwidth WAN upgrades.

What to watch

Track Digital Realty's LAX12 landing-station progress for committed cable operators, published pricing, and power-allocation details before incorporating it into multi-region architecture plans. Monitor Subco's APX systems for capacity commitments and pricing once construction milestones are confirmed. Expect more carrier proposals for AI-focused inter-data-center connectivity as Verizon and others deploy fiber capacity from long-term supply agreements, but evaluate each proposal against specific latency, redundancy, and SLA requirements rather than assuming competitive pricing automatically follows infrastructure investment.