Amazon is building an undersea fiber optic cable called Fastnet that will connect the east coast of Maryland to County Cork, Ireland, making it the company’s first wholly owned undersea cable project.
Submarine fiber optic communications cables carry over 95% of the world’s international data and voice traffic. These cables transmit hundreds of terabits of data per second, including government communications, financial transactions, email, video calls, and streaming.
Amazon has previously invested in several undersea cable projects as part of a consortium, including Jako, Bifrost, and Havfrue, but Fastnet is the first time a technology company has undertaken these projects alone.
“The ocean floor is really essential to AWS and to connecting internationally across oceans,” Matt Rader, vice president of core networking at Amazon Web Services, told CNBC in an interview about Amazon’s investment in submarine cables.
“Without the ocean floor, we would have to rely on satellite connectivity to work,” he says. “However, satellites have long delays, high costs, and don’t provide enough capacity or throughput that customers or the Internet as a whole need.”
Amazon says Fastnet has a capacity of more than 320 terabits per second, which is equivalent to streaming 12.5 million HD movies simultaneously. The company is building this cable to meet the growing demand for edge applications that use cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and Amazon Web Services.
Fastnet will also strengthen Amazon’s network resiliency. Amazon hasn’t said how much it will cost to build Fastnet, but the company said it expects it to be up and running by 2028. google, meta, microsoft The company is also investing in submarine cable infrastructure.
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