Amazon is planning to deploy a subsea cable linking Ireland to the US.
First reported by Roderick Beck’s subsea cables and Internet infrastructure blog and the Southern Star, Amazon’s Irish unit has filed an application form with the Irish Maritime Area Regulatory Authority that details plans for a cable landing in County Cork, Ireland.
Amazon MCS Ireland Ltd. has filed for a geophysical survey and site investigations to evaluate route and landing point options for a proposed transatlantic subsea fiber optic cable.
The cable would make landfall around Castlefreke in Cork across the Celtic Sea and Atlantic Ocean to an unnamed point on the East Coast of the United States.
The license application area covers two potential landfalls on Ireland’s south coast close to Rosscarbery, with survey corridors through Rosscarbery Bay to a potential landfall at Ownahincha/Little Island Strand to the West and a landfall at Long Strand to the East.
Further details on the cable capacity or project timelines were not shared.
The application was made in June 2024, but Beck’s blog is the first report about the project and Amazon is yet to make any announcement about its plans.
DCD has reached out to Amazon for comment.
According to Telegeography, Amazon is a part owner or major capacity buyer on the Havfrue, Hawaiki, Jupiter, and Marea subsea cables. Launched in 2020, Havfrue (also known as AEC-2) links the US to Ireland, Norway, and Denmark. Aqua Comms is the landing party in Lecanvey, County Mayo, for the Irish portion of the cable.
Amazon is also working with Vodafone on the Beaufort cable, which is set to link Ireland to the UK. Due to land at the former ESAT 1 landing station at Kilmore Quay in Wexford on the Irish side, it is due to land in Bude in England and Port Eynon in Wales on the UK side. The cable was originally due for service in 2024.
Most of Ireland’s subsea cables land around Dublin on the east coast or on the west coast around Mayo or Galway. The only cable to land in County Cork is Exa’s Exa Express cable. Launched in 2015 as the Hibernia Express (and later GTT Express) the 53Tbps system links Ireland to the UK and Canada, landing in Brean in the UK and Halifax across the Atlantic. Exa’s landing point in Cork is at the Cork Internet eXchange/CloudCIX on the Hollyhill Industrial Estate in Cork.
Beck suggests the site and route might appeal to Amazon as it would offer diversity to most of the existing cable systems in Ireland, offering greater resilience and redundancy in and out of a major cloud hub for the company. Amazon, like many cloud providers, has a major presence in Ireland and operates a number of data centers across various sites in Dublin.