Amazon building Fastnet, its first solo subsea cable project

Amazon It is building a subsea fiber optic cable called Fastnet to connect Maryland’s east coast to County Cork, Ireland, the company’s first wholly owned subsea cable project.

Submarine fiber optic communications cables carry more than 95% of international data and voice traffic around the world. These cables transmit hundreds of terabits of data per second, including government communications, financial transactions, email, video calls and streaming.

Amazon has invested in several subsea cable projects in the past as part of a consortium, including Jako, Bifrost and Havfrue, but Fastnet is the first time the tech company has undertaken one of these projects on its own.

“Submarine is really important for AWS and international connectivity across oceans,” Matt Rehder, vice president of core networks for Amazon Web Services, told CNBC in an interview about Amazon’s subsea cable investments.

“Without the submarine, you would have to rely on the satellite link to work,” he said. “But satellite has higher latency, costs higher, and you don’t get enough capacity or throughput to meet the needs of our customers and the internet in general.”

Amazon says Fastnet’s capacity will exceed 320 terabits per second, which is equivalent to streaming 12.5 million HD movies simultaneously. The company produces this cable to meet the growing demand for cloud computing, artificial intelligence and edge applications using Amazon Web Services.

Fastnet will also strengthen Amazon’s network resilience. Amazon did not say how much it would cost to build Fastnet, but the company said it expects Fastnet to be operational by 2028. Other tech giants include Google, Meta and Microsoft It is also investing in undersea cable infrastructure.

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