Subco unveils 40,000km Indo-Pacific subsea cable plan
SUBCO has announced plans for three new subsea cable systems across the Indo-Pacific, totaling over 40,000km, with installation expected to take just over three years. The project, described as the largest subsea infrastructure build by a carrier in the region, aims to address growing demand for data capacity driven by AI workloads and trans-Pacific traffic.
The planned infrastructure includes APX North, a 9,500km system connecting Sydney to Japan via Guam, designed to create a direct fiber route. This route includes switched branching units, allowing some fiber pairs to bypass Guam and operate directly between Australia and Japan.
APX East-2, a 10,000km, 24-fibre-pair cable between Guam and Los Angeles, is intended to provide an alternative path for traffic between Asia and the US. SUBCO's founder, Bevan Slattery, stated this segment will serve as a backbone for trans-Pacific traffic and offer diverse connectivity for Australia and Japan through APX North.
APX West is a 4,600km system connecting Perth to Singapore, with branches to Jakarta and Batam in Indonesia. This design aims to support additional resilience and switching between these interconnection hubs, which Slattery noted are critical and growing in strategic importance for Asia's connectivity.
SUBCO explicitly links this expansion to the accelerating demand from artificial intelligence workloads and the movement of data across long-distance international networks. Slattery emphasized that "AI factories are dead without massive subsea connectivity to carry tokens from factory to customers," requiring hundreds of terabits per second of capacity.
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