EXA Infrastructure has completed its acquisition of Aqua Comms, expanding its transatlantic and intra-European subsea footprint and adding new capacity between North America, Ireland, and mainland Europe. The transaction strengthens EXA Infrastructure’s wholesale connectivity platform serving cloud, content, carrier, and enterprise customers.
EXA Infrastructure operates more than 160,000 km (≈99,400 miles) of digital infrastructure across 37 countries, including seven transatlantic routes and 22 cable landing stations across North America and Europe. The acquisition integrates Aqua Comms’ subsea systems and operational capabilities into EXA’s existing terrestrial and subsea network, creating a more tightly meshed long-haul and regional connectivity platform.
Aqua Comms owns and operates multiple transatlantic and regional submarine cables, including America Europe Connect-1 (AEC-1), America Europe Connect-2 (AEC-2), CeltixConnect-1 (CC-1), and CeltixConnect-2 (CC-2). It also participates in the ownership consortium for the Amitié cable system (also referred to as AEC-3). These assets add route diversity and resiliency across key North Atlantic corridors and strengthen links between the U.S., Ireland, the UK, and mainland Europe.
- Adds multiple transatlantic and Irish Sea subsea systems to EXA Infrastructure’s network
- Expands direct subsea connectivity between the U.S., Ireland, and mainland Europe
- Increases route diversity and resiliency across a unified subsea and terrestrial mesh
- Strengthens wholesale capacity offerings for AI, cloud, and content providers
- Integrates Aqua Comms’ subsea operations expertise into EXA’s pan-European platform
“With the acquisition now complete, EXA Infrastructure has significantly enhanced our Transatlantic and European connectivity offerings. Customers will benefit from unrivalled route diversity enhanced resiliency across a unified, meshed subsea and terrestrial network,” said Jim Fagan, Chief Executive Officer at EXA Infrastructure.
🌐 Analysis
Aqua Comms was founded in 2014 by serial subsea cable entrepreneurs Nigel Bayliff and Tony O’Reilly Jr., with a strategy focused on building carrier-neutral, high-capacity submarine cable systems across the North Atlantic and Irish Sea. The company secured early backing from institutional infrastructure investors, most notably D9 Infrastructure, which provided long-term capital to support the development and operation of multiple subsea assets. Aqua Comms built a differentiated position by owning and operating independent, non-consortium transatlantic systems such as AEC-1 and AEC-2, offering direct access to Ireland as a strategic landing hub for U.S. hyperscalers, cloud providers, and content networks. Its competitive advantages included route diversity away from traditional UK and France landings, flexible wholesale models based on fibre pairs and spectrum, and deep operational expertise in subsea systems, which ultimately made it a complementary fit within EXA Infrastructure’s broader subsea and terrestrial platform.
The combined EXA + AquaComms subsea portfolio now spans AEC-1 and AEC-2 linking the U.S. East Coast directly to Ireland, CC-1 and CC-2 providing resilient Irish Sea connectivity between Ireland and the UK, and participation in the Amitié system, which adds a newer, high-fiber-count transatlantic route connecting North America to the UK and France with onward connectivity into continental Europe. Together, these systems provide multiple geographically diverse Atlantic crossings, reduce reliance on single landing points, and support scalable fibre-pair and spectrum-based services.
The Amitié submarine cable system is a high-capacity transatlantic network linking North America directly to the UK and France, with onward connectivity into mainland Europe, designed to support large-scale cloud and content traffic growth. Owned and operated by a consortium that includes Aqua Comms, Amitié adds a newer, high-fiber-count route across the Atlantic, complementing Aqua Comms’ wholly owned AEC-1 and AEC-2 systems that land in Ireland. In the context of EXA Infrastructure’s acquisition of Aqua Comms, participation in the Amitié system extends EXA’s transatlantic reach beyond Ireland-centric routes, adding additional geographic diversity, landing points, and resiliency across key North Atlantic corridors.
This consolidation reflects a broader industry pattern in which operators combine subsea and dense terrestrial assets to offer end-to-end wholesale platforms, positioning themselves to support AI-driven traffic growth, distributed cloud regions, and higher resiliency requirements from hyperscalers and global content providers.
EXA Infrastructure is a London-based digital infrastructure operator and a portfolio company of I Squared Capital, focused on high-capacity fibre networks across Europe with direct connectivity to North America and onward routes to Asia via the Middle East. The company operates more than 160,000 km (≈99,400 miles) of terrestrial and subsea infrastructure across 37 countries, including seven transatlantic routes and 22 cable landing stations. EXA traces its roots to the European fibre assets originally built by Global Crossing and later expanded under GTT before being acquired by I Squared Capital and rebranded as EXA Infrastructure in 2021, establishing a dedicated, carrier-neutral wholesale platform. EXA Infrastructure serves cloud, content, carrier, government, and enterprise customers with wholesale fibre, spectrum, and capacity services, supporting use cases ranging from hyperscale cloud and AI workloads to ultra-low-latency financial, gaming, and broadcast networks.
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