Subco plans three new APAC subsea cables by 2029 to support AI traffic

Details: John Tanner; Category: Optical & Fixed Networks; 22 September 2026; 567 views

Subco plans three new APAC subsea cables to support AI traffic — Image credit: Aeira Digital | Unsplash

Australian submarine cable development firm Subco announced plans on Tuesday to build three new subsea cables by 2029 to support demand for AI data centres in Asia-Pacific, one of which will bring more international bandwidth to Indonesia.

The APX West cable is planned as a 4,600-km, 24 fibre pair system connecting Perth to Singapore, with branches to Jakarta and Batam. Subco founder and co-CEO Bevan Slattery said the system is designed for additional resiliency and unprecedented flexibility through switching in and out of new regional interconnection hubs in Jakarta and Batam, the latter of which has become a major focus of data centre activity and subsea cable landings in Indonesia.

“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,” Slattery said in a statement. “We are building as much of that as possible into our system design and making that available to our cornerstone customers through APX West.”

Meanwhile, Subco said it will build APX North, a 9,500-km, 24 fibre pair system connecting Sydney to Japan via Guam. The system is designed to enable direct connectivity between Japan and Australia via switched branching units that allow selected fibre pairs to bypass the Guam landing station.

Then there’s APX East-2, a 10,000 km, 24 fibre pair subsea cable connecting Guam to Los Angeles, designed to provide critical route diversity from the US to both Japan and Australia, via Guam.

“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,” Slattery said.

Subco intends to complete all three systems in 2029, which Slattery admitted was ambitious, “but it’s achievable and it’s necessary,” given the escalating demand for AI data centres and AI ‘factories’ across the Asia-Pacific region.

“People have been slow to understand that AI factories are dead without massive subsea connectivity to carry tokens from factory to customers,” Slattery said. “[That requires] hundreds and hundreds of terabits per second. That’s why we are about to undertake the single largest subsea infrastructure build ever by a carrier in the Indo-Pacific.”