MDM announced the $500 million combined project on 7 August. Narwhal 1 will run from the company’s existing landing station in Galway to Long Island, New York, with a provisional ready-for-service date of the third quarter of 2029.

Narwhal 2 will connect a new landing station on Ireland’s south coast to New Jersey, targeting 2030. Both projects are being funded through private equity and industry partners, and MDM is currently working through permit applications alongside the marine survey process now visible off the Galway coast.

Ireland’s transatlantic credentials are already building. Galway sits alongside Cork, where AWS’s Fastnet cable is due to link the county directly to Maryland by 2028, part of what Taoiseach Micheál Martin called Ireland becoming “a true gateway to Europe” for subsea traffic. MDM’s own Galway landing station already carries Farice’s IRIS system from Iceland, giving the site an established role as a Nordic-Atlantic junction before Narwhal adds a second US connection to the same location.

The two Narwhal systems are not designed to stand alone. MDM is positioning them as the North American leg of a wider network anchored on Ireland, one that already includes the EU-co-funded Pisces system linking Galway to Spain, France and Portugal, a planned Galway-to-Norway route, and multiple Ireland-to-UK systems.

Interconnected, the network would let transatlantic traffic land in Galway and route onward to continental Europe, the UK and Scandinavia without a second mid-Atlantic hop, according to MDM.

That ambition rests partly on infrastructure MDM already controls. The company’s existing Galway landing station, built over three decades of subsea work stretching back to 1990, is the anchor point for Narwhal 1 as well as Pisces, giving MDM a head start other transatlantic entrants would need to build from scratch. Director and co-founder Jim McMahon has said demand for transatlantic capacity is expected to grow substantially over the next five years, a forecast that lines up with the broader hyperscaler-driven subsea investment wave reshaping Atlantic and Pacific routes alike.

The timeline is worth treating with some caution. Pisces, announced in May 2024, was originally slated to begin construction in March 2025; that start slipped to 2026, and its Galway-to-Sines main trunk is now targeted for completion in 2028. If Narwhal 1 and 2 follow a similar pattern, MDM’s 2029 and 2030 ready-for-service dates should be read as provisional starting points rather than fixed delivery windows.

For Ireland, the strategic logic is clearer than the delivery schedule. It echoes a point made earlier this year by subsea veteran Nigel Bayliff, who argued that Dublin and Cornwall are natural landing-station clusters precisely because multiple cables converging on one point create compounding value for operators and data centres alike.

Rather than each new cable system standing as an isolated project, MDM is stacking transatlantic, Nordic, UK and continental European routes onto a single landing point in Galway: an approach that, if delivered, would give the town a claim to being one of Europe’s more consequential subsea junctions rather than a single-cable landing site. Route diversity and resilience feature heavily on this year’s Capacity Europe agenda, including a dedicated session on protecting the cables Europe can’t afford to lose, a debate the Narwhal project sits squarely inside.

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