Content and cloud companies bought space on those systems as customers. That model is breaking down. AWS, Microsoft, Google and Meta are increasingly choosing to own the cables outright, and the shift says as much about how hyperscalers now think about resilience as it does about capacity.
AWS goes solo
In November 2025, AWS announced Fastnet, its first wholly-owned transatlantic cable, linking Maryland’s Eastern Shore to County Cork, Ireland. Due for service in 2028, the system is designed for more than 320 Tbps of capacity across 16 fibre pairs.
Two details stand out. First, ownership: Fastnet marks a break from AWS’s previous approach of buying capacity or joining consortium builds such as Jupiter, Havfrue, Marea and Bifrost. Second, geography: it will be the first transatlantic cable to land in Maryland, and it lands in Cork rather than the Dublin, Mayo or Galway corridors where most of Ireland’s existing cables come ashore. AWS has framed the unusual landing points explicitly around resilience, giving customers an alternative data pathway if cables on the busier traditional corridors are damaged or disrupted. The cable will be buried around 1.5 metres beneath the seabed, with extra armour near shore.
AWS separately holds a stake in the Beaufort cable, developed with Vodafone, which will also land in Ireland and Wales when it enters service.
Microsoft follows through Wales
Microsoft has taken a similar route into the same stretch of water. Filings with Ireland’s Maritime Area Regulatory Authority describe three planned systems connecting Ireland to Wales: Tuskar (Kilmore Quay to Newgale, Pembrokeshire), SOBR1 (Dublin Bay to Anglesey) and SOBR2 (Portmarnock/Malahide to Abergele). The filings were lodged in 2024 but only became widely known this year, and Microsoft is now understood to be carrying out geophysical surveys along the proposed routes.
It isn’t Microsoft’s first move into subsea ownership. The company has previously invested in transatlantic and transpacific capacity through partners including Hibernia and Aqua Comms, connecting its data centre footprint from North America through Ireland and on to the UK. The new filings go further, positioning Microsoft as a direct investor in Irish Sea infrastructure rather than a capacity buyer on someone else’s system.
Google and Meta got there first
AWS and Microsoft are, in one sense, catching up. Google built its first fully private cable, Curie, connecting California and Chile, in 2019, and has since added Dunant (Virginia to France), Equiano (Portugal to Africa) and Nuvem (South Carolina, Bermuda, Portugal), among others, Google confirmed it is the sole funder of Nuvem. Meta has gone further still: alongside decade-long involvement in more than 20 consortium systems including 2Africa and Havhingsten (Ireland to the Nordics and UK), it announced Project Waterworth in February 2025, a solo commitment spanning more than 50,000km across five continents with landing points in the US, India, Brazil and South Africa, the longest subsea cable project ever attempted.
What’s changed is less the appetite of any single hyperscaler and more the fact that all four are now moving in parallel, on overlapping routes, at a moment when AI-driven traffic growth has made every one of them a large enough buyer to justify building alone. It’s also worth noting the shift isn’t uniform: as of late 2025, Microsoft remained primarily an anchor-tenant investor in third-party systems rather than a sole owner, and its Ireland–Wales filings are marine survey applications, an earlier stage than AWS’s confirmed, fully-owned Fastnet build.
Why now
Three forces are converging:
- AI traffic growth. Training and inference workloads move enormous volumes of data between data centres, and hyperscalers argue that consortium cables, sized for years-ago demand forecasts, no longer scale fast enough on their own.
- Resilience concerns. Cable damage — accidental and, increasingly, suspected deliberate interference — has pushed connectivity up the risk register. Ireland’s east coast, in particular, has become a genuine chokepoint: Ireland now hosts more than 100 operational data centres, and digital infrastructure demand accounts for close to all of the country’s international telecoms connectivity demand, according to Irish government figures. Landing new cables away from that concentration, as AWS is doing at Cork and Microsoft is surveying for at multiple Welsh landing points, spreads the physical risk.
- Ownership economics. A hyperscaler that owns a cable outright controls its own upgrade path, capacity allocation and maintenance priority, it isn’t competing with other consortium members for scarce fibre pairs during a demand spike.
The capacity crunch behind the build-out
Hyperscaler demand is running into a genuine supply constraint. The specialist cable-laying fleet is small, and the manufacturing base is concentrated among a handful of suppliers, chiefly SubCom, Alcatel Submarine Networks and NEC on the Western-aligned side. Industry commentary suggests order books at these suppliers are stretched years out, though exact backlog figures aren’t publicly disclosed. That scarcity is one plausible reason hyperscalers are now willing to fund and control entire systems rather than wait for consortium capacity to free up.
What to watch
- Whether Fastnet and Microsoft’s Ireland–Wales systems secure final licensing and construction timelines hold to 2028 and beyond
- Whether Amazon’s separate proposed Cork-to-US cable, filed with Ireland’s maritime regulator, advances alongside Fastnet
- Whether other hyperscalers follow with their own solo builds on routes currently served only by consortium cables
- How cable-laying capacity constraints affect pricing and timelines across the industry as demand from four large buyers converges on the same limited pool of specialist vessels and manufacturers
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