EXA Infrastructure marked its first year in business by unveiling a further strategic investment program that increases the total routes currently under construction to 8,400 kilometers. The commitment will further increase the geographic reach and capacity offered, particularly in central and southern countries, and adds to the 7,000 new kilometers announced just four months ago.
These new projects will increase routing diversity, capacity around key data center clusters and resilience of some of the continent’s most critical network links. They will further enable EXA to offer the broadest geographical coverage across Europe and transatlantic routes, bringing greater capacity, intelligence and automation.
The program is on top of the €190 million for new infrastructure and upgrade projects already announced in May. EXA’s growth strategy is centered on investing capital in new infrastructure where customers need it, and optimizing existing assets to unlock their potential, to become the undisputed leader in the European digital infrastructure market.
The latest investment is closely tied to current and anticipated demand from hyperscale network users, large enterprises, telecoms carriers and governments. The investment projects included in the new program are:
- A new 830-kilometre northern Balkans link connecting Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Udinese, forming a low latency and diverse route connecting the major traffic hubs of Sofia and Istanbul to western Europe
- A major new 600-kilometer-high fiber count cable route between Barcelona, Zaragoza and Bilbao that will create a new high-capacity, low latency link between the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic cable landing station and data center clusters
- Major enhancements to metropolitan area fiber around Barcelona to interconnect existing and newly announced data centers, as well as the new cable landing station serving Mediterranean and North African subsea cables.
- Creation of a new route linking Ghent and Brussels in Belgium, and an upgrade of the cable between Brussels with Frankfurt, Germany, forming the most direct and modern route between London and Germany’s financial heartland
- An expansion of co-location facilities within Milan’s principal telecommunications campus at Via Caldera, including a new data center fit-out as part of continued investment in co-location
- Installation of a new high fiber count cable route between Milan and Zurich
- Comprehensive upgrades to Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) equipment across many parts of Europe with the latest Infinera optical technology, vastly increasing the footprint for 400 Gigabit-per-Second (Gbps) services that increase capacity while reducing complexity
“EXA has moved mountains in the past 12 months to deliver on our promises to our customers, partners, suppliers and our own colleagues. This is just the beginning: we want to continue to offer the best and broadest network available with a team that is easy to do business with, in lock-step with what our customers require,” he added.