Australian digital infrastructure firm SubCo is planning several new subsea cable projects linking Australia, Asia, and the US.

The company last week announced three new Indo-Pacific subsea projects totaling more than 40,000km (24,855 miles) of fiber.

APX North will span 9,500km (5,903 miles), connecting Sydney, Australia, to Japan via Guam. The company said it will feature switched branching units enabling select fiber pairs to bypass Guam entirely.

APX East-2 will span 10,000km (6,214 miles), connecting Guam to Los Angeles.

APX West will span 4,600km (2,858 miles), connecting Perth to Singapore, with branches to Jakarta and Batam.

All three systems will offer 24 fiber pairs and are due live in 2029.

Full details on the landing points have not been shared.

“This segment is vital and will serve as the backbone for trans-Pacific traffic between Asia and the US, as well as providing diverse connectivity for Australia and Japan via APX North. We expect this system to be incredibly popular,” said founder & co-CEO of SubCo, Bevan Slattery. “Singapore and Indonesia remain critical to Asia's connectivity landscape, and their strategic importance will only grow as bandwidth demand accelerates, and new interconnection hubs are needed to deliver greater flexibility and route diversity. We are building as much of that as possible into our system design and making that available to our cornerstone customers through APX West.”

Currently, the Australia-Japan Cable (AJC) is the only cable directly linking Australia to Japan (with branches to Guam). A consortium project dating back to 2001, the cable was backed by AT&T, NTT, SoftBank, Telstra, and Verizon.

Vocus’ Australia-Singapore Cable (ASC) from 2018 and the Inigo-West consortium cable from 2019 both currently connect Perth to Singapore. Batam, located close to Singapore, has more than 20 cables live or in development, but only one (BW Digital’s upcoming Hawaiki Nui 1 system) is due to connect directly to Australia.

US territory Guam is a major cable landing point in the Pacific Ocean, with some 18 live and planned cables landing there linking the US, Australia, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

“I know it’s ambitious, but it’s achievable, and it’s necessary. People have been slow to understand that AI factories are dead without massive subsea connectivity to carry tokens from factory to customers,” added Slattery. “That’s why we are about to undertake the single largest subsea infrastructure build ever by a carrier in the Indo-Pacific. Not only is the build itself huge, but the timeframe is compressed with over 40,000km of cable to be installed in just over three years.”

SubCo, part of Slattery’s Soda Group, also owns the Oman Australia Cable and has capacity on the Indigo subsea cables. The company is developing the SMAP cable linking Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, and is additionally developing a domestic subsea cable connecting mainland Australia to the island of Tasmania.

SubCo is also building APX East, a new cable linking Australia directly to the US.

First announced in January, the 16-fiber-pair system is set to connect Australia to the US, running from the north of Sydney in New South Wales to San Diego, California. The cable’s landing station in Australia will be at NextDC’s S1/S2 site in Sydney.

APX East is expected to be Ready for Service in Q4 2028. A Hawaii branch is to follow in Q4 2029, and a Fiji branch is also planned.

Australian neocloud Firmus is taking capacity on both the Tasmanian cable and APX East.