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SubCo Unveils Three Indo-Pacific Subsea Cable Systems Spanning Over 40,000km

By: IDCNOVARegion: Oceania
Australian digital infrastructure firm SubCo has announced plans for three new subsea cable projects across the Indo-Pacific region, a build that would collectively span more than 40,000km of fiber and rank as the largest subsea infrastructure undertaking ever by a carrier in the region. The announcement underscores the growing urgency among infrastructure developers to expand trans-Pacific connectivity capacity as demand for data-intensive workloads, particularly those driven by artificial intelligence, continues to accelerate.

The three systems — APX North, APX East-2, and APX West — are designed to link Australia with Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, and the United States. APX North will cover 9,500km, connecting Sydney to Japan via Guam, and will feature switched branching units that allow select fiber pairs to bypass Guam entirely. APX East-2 will stretch 10,000km from Guam to Los Angeles, while APX West will run 4,600km from Perth to Singapore, with branches extending to Jakarta and Batam. All three systems will offer 24 fiber pairs and are scheduled to enter service in 2029. Full details on landing points have not yet been disclosed.

The strategic significance of the build lies in the current limitations of Indo-Pacific connectivity. The Australia-Japan Cable, a consortium project dating back to 2001 and backed by AT&T, NTT, SoftBank, Telstra, and Verizon, remains the only cable directly linking Australia to Japan. On the Perth-Singapore route, only the Vocus Australia-Singapore Cable from 2018 and the Inigo-West consortium cable from 2019 are currently operational. Batam, located near Singapore, hosts more than 20 live or developing cables, yet only one — BW Digital's upcoming Hawaiki Nui 1 system — is due to connect directly to Australia. Guam, a US territory, serves as a major Pacific landing point with approximately 18 live and planned cables linking the US, Australia, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

SubCo founder and co-CEO Bevan Slattery framed the projects as essential infrastructure for the AI era. "This segment is vital and will serve as the backbone for trans-Pacific traffic between Asia and the US, as well as providing diverse connectivity for Australia and Japan via APX North. We expect this system to be incredibly popular," he said. "Singapore and Indonesia remain critical to Asia's connectivity landscape, and their strategic importance will only grow as bandwidth demand accelerates, and new interconnection hubs are needed to deliver greater flexibility and route diversity. We are building as much of that as possible into our system design and making that available to our cornerstone customers through APX West."

Slattery also emphasized the scale and time pressure of the undertaking. "I know it's ambitious, but it's achievable, and it's necessary. People have been slow to understand that AI factories are dead without massive subsea connectivity to carry tokens from factory to customers," he added. "That's why we are about to undertake the single largest subsea infrastructure build ever by a carrier in the Indo-Pacific. Not only is the build itself huge, but the timeframe is compressed with over 40,000km of cable to be installed in just over three years."

The announcement reflects a broader trend of escalating investment in subsea infrastructure as AI-driven data center demand strains existing capacity. SubCo, part of Slattery's Soda Group, already owns the Oman Australia Cable and holds capacity on the Indigo subsea cables. The company is separately developing the SMAP cable linking Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, as well as a domestic subsea cable connecting mainland Australia to Tasmania. It is also building APX East, a 16-fiber-pair system first announced in January that will connect Sydney to San Diego, with a landing station at NextDC's S1/S2 site in Sydney. APX East is expected to be ready for service in the fourth quarter of 2028, with a Hawaii branch to follow in late 2029 and a Fiji branch also planned. Australian neocloud provider Firmus has secured capacity on both the Tasmanian cable and APX East.