The system, Exa Meridian, will become Exa’s ninth transatlantic cable and is scheduled to be ready for service in Q4 2029. The system Exa Meridian will run 24 fibre pairs, delivering more than 500 Tbps of scalable capacity aimed at hyperscalers, neoclouds, financial institutions, government and research organisations. The project has reached Contract in Force with subsea specialist Xtera, which will act as a key supplier on a build led and delivered by Exa itself.
Unlike a standalone cable sold purely on capacity, Exa Meridian will connect directly into Exa’s existing owned network. A new cable landing station in Brean will link the system through diverse terrestrial routes to Slough and EXA’s pan-European backbone, giving customers a wider mesh of route options between North America and Europe rather than a single point-to-point link. Exa said the cable is already backed by anchor customer commitments from neocloud and hyperscale players, alongside the supplier agreements needed to support delivery.
Why now, and why a single operator Exa is pitching Exa Meridian as a direct response to a shift in how the largest capacity buyers procure subsea bandwidth. Jim Fagan, CEO of Exa Infrastructure, said demand across the Atlantic is changing quickly, with the largest customers increasingly planning in full spectrum and fibre pairs rather than individual wavelengths, and that the capacity needed toward the end of the decade has to be committed now to be ready in time. That demand shift is being driven by AI, cloud and distributed data centre architectures generating more traffic between North America and Europe.
Fagan framed the project as proof of Exa’s investment discipline: understanding where the market is heading, securing capital early, and having the delivery experience to execute once the opportunity is there. How it fits the wider transatlantic build-out Exa Meridian sits at a different point in the current subsea investment cycle to the hyperscaler-owned cables now under construction elsewhere on the same route. Where AWS’s Fastnet and Microsoft’s proposed Ireland-Wales systems represent AI labs and cloud providers funding and controlling their own infrastructure end-to-end, Exa Meridian is a carrier-neutral wholesale operator building solo capacity that hyperscalers and neoclouds can then buy into as anchor tenants, rather than own outright.
Both approaches are responses to the same underlying pressure: capacity buyers who used to purchase individual wavelengths now want entire fibre pairs, and in some cases entire systems, to meet AI-driven bandwidth growth. Exa has been steadily building out its transatlantic position over the past two years, adding Dunant, Havfrue and Amitié to its network alongside its existing cable systems, and expanding its European terrestrial backbone with new corridors such as the Barcelona-Bilbao route announced in August. Exa Meridian extends that strategy to a new, wholly-owned system rather than a route addition on an existing cable.
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