Exa Infrastructure has expanded its long-haul terrestrial network with a route that directly connects the northern Spanish cities of Barcelona and Bilbao.

The company announced that the route creates a new corridor that serves Transatlantic to Mediterranean, Middle East, Africa and Asia traffic flows.

According to Exa, the development is a key milestone for the Barcelona hub of the network, as it seeks to position the city from a "predominantly Mediterranean exchange point into a true east-west gateway with seamless access to Atlantic and transatlantic cable systems."

The company claims that the new link reduces cross-Spain latency by 52 percent, creating direct Atlantic access for subsea cables landing in the Mediterranean.

Exa adds that the route serves the Zaragoza region, placing new data center resources at the connection of Lisbon and Madrid traffic flows to the rest of Europe — and now transatlantic traffic to Mediterranean-facing locations. 

Zaragoza has become one of Europe's fastest-growing hyperscale and AI data center hubs, with AWS, Microsoft, and QTS all investing heavily in the city.

Meanwhile, across Catalonia, Exa said it connects to the region's eight main data centers. The company adds that the addition of its long-haul terrestrial route to Bilbao "creates an unbroken, high-performance path that brings those cables measurably closer to North America."

“Barcelona has always been a natural meeting point between East and West,” said Steve Roberts, SVP, strategic investments and product management, Exa Infrastructure.

“By extending our terrestrial long-haul footprint directly to the Atlantic corridor, we are giving our customers, and the subsea players that already land there, a genuinely shorter and more resilient path to transatlantic systems.”

Last year, I Squared Capital-owned Exa refinanced its existing facilities and raised more than €1.3 billion ($1.52bn) in new financing.

At the end of last year, the company completed its acquisition of subsea cable operator Aqua Comms from Digital 9 Infrastructure.

The company's footprint currently sits at more than 160,000km (99,419 miles) of digital infrastructure across 37 countries, including seven Transatlantic routes and 22 cable landing stations across North America and Europe.