CEO Martijn Blanken and CTO Ciaran Delaney say in a video interview recorded at Capacity’s ITW event in May that the company is working with three of the biggest hyperscalers on the project.
It will be part of a network linking data centres in London and Amsterdam, from the southern coast of England and the north coast of France across the Channel.
Exa Infrastructure is the name, announced last year, for the former infrastructure division of GTT Communications. I Squared Capital of the US bought the business, which includes the former Interoute and Hibernia Networks, for $2.1 billion in a deal completed in September 2021.
Now, 11 months after the acquisition was closed, Blanken and colleagues are planning to upgrade the network substantially.
An essential part of this, he says in the video interview, is reinforcing the southern European area, including Spain, France, Italy and Greece.
But Exa Infrastructure is also building the new cross-Channel cable as part of its development, he tells Capacity. He names the hyperscale partners in the interview.
The first England-France cable across the channel for many years was Crosslake Fibre’s, from Brighton, Sussex, to Veules-les-Roses in Normandy. This went into service in December 2021, more than two decades after the previous England-France subsea cable, which was euNetworks and Zayo’s Circe South, in service since 1999 from Cayeux-sur-Mer to Pevensey Bay.
There are other cables across the North Sea, but much of the traffic is routed through the service bore of the Channel Tunnel, for which Colt owns the access rights.
Watch the video interview here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzOlvazmQjQ
