Australian cloud company Firmus Technologies and fiber firm SubCo are partnering for a subsea cable connecting mainland Australia to the island of Tasmania.

Announced this week, Bernacchi-1 will link Tasmania to SubCo’s upcoming SMAP domestic cable between Sydney and Melbourne.

The SMAP cable is due to be ready for service in June 2026. This Tasmanian branch is expected to be operational in Q2 2027.

Underwritten by Firmus, the branch will deliver more than 60 Tbps – which the companies said is more than all the existing cables to the island combined.

“We're re-wiring Australia's digital infrastructure to make Australia one of the world's largest exporters of AI Tokens. Investing in the critical sub-sea connectivity infrastructure required for this task is another example of Firmus leadership as a full-stack AI factory platform company,” said Tim Rosenfield, founder & co-CEO, Firmus Technologies.

The system will land at an undisclosed location in Northern Tasmania and provide dual pathways to the mainland to Melbourne and Sydney.

There are currently three cables linking mainland Australia to Tasmania: Telstra’s Bass Strait-1 and -2 systems from 1995 and 2003, respectively, and Basslink Telecoms’ Basslink system from 2005 (now operated by AARNet). They land in Boat Harbour, Four Mile Bluff, and Stanley, respectively.

Bernacchi-1 will be the first cable along this route in more than 20 years. It will be the first cable linking Tasmania to New South Wales.

The system is named for Tasmanian-raised scientist and Antarctic explorer Louis Bernacchi.

Founded in 2019, Firmus was initially focused on crypto and high-performance compute, specializing in immersion cooling, but today describes itself as a pure AI factory builder.

The Nvidia-backed company has a small existing facility in Tasmania but is developing a 90MW data center in Launceston. It is partnering with CDC to roll out capacity on the mainland and targeting some 1.6GW of infrastructure by 2028.

The SMAP cable is set to link Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth. SubCo previously planned to land the cable in Tasmania but dropped the idea.

The 5,000km domestic cable, first announced by SubCo in 2023, was originally designed as a 12-fiber pair system but was later upgraded to a planned 16-fiber pair system offering 400Tbps.

SubCo, founded in 2016 and part of Slattery’s Soda Group, owns the Oman Australia Cable and has capacity on the Indigo subsea cables. It is also planning a new cable linking Australia to the US.

“I've been trying to build a new fiber route between Tasmania and the mainland for over a decade to bring much-needed diversity, resiliency, and cheaper connectivity to Australia and the world,” said Bevan Slattery, SubCo founder & co-CEO. “Bernacchi-1 for me is a great example of how Australia can leverage AI to create new sovereign-owned infrastructure capability for the benefit of the nation as a whole — and this simply would not have happened without Firmus' significant investment and underwriting the long-term operations.”

Renewable energy firm Energy Estate is also aiming to develop subsea cable systems linking Tasmania and Australia to the US and Japan. The CaliNewy cable (California to Australia) will land in Bell Bay, while the IndoMaris cable (Oman to India to Australia) will land close to Burnie.

While many traditional hyperscale firms, such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, all have direct investments in subsea cables, Firmus may well be the first neocloud to directly invest in a subsea cable.