EXA Infrastructure has announced the completion of two new high-capacity terrestrial routes, Milan-Zurich and Paris-Vienna.
The firm noted that artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud traffic has outgrown the idea that diversity just means creating a backup path, and that businesses instead want a choice of routes they can design around resilience, latency and capacity requirements.
The digital infrastructure platform has been undertaking an expansion of its network after refinancing its existing facilities and raising financing that totals over €1.3bn almost exactly a year ago. The company owns over 155,000km of fibre network across 37 countries, including six transatlantic cables, and claims the lowest latency link between Europe and North America, EXA Express.
EXA offers networks for governments and enterprises; hyperscale infrastructure for global businesses; and ultra-low latency, high-bandwidth networks for financial, gaming and broadcast services. More than 65,000km of the network is 400G-enabled, offering further scalability and ensuring ultra-low latency and high-bandwidth connectivity across continents.
The routes are said to advance EXA’s strategy to run subsea and terrestrial assets as one resilient mesh across Europe and North America. Both routes complete or extend longer corridors that run through Frankfurt, adding capacity with long-term headroom for AI, cloud and content traffic. They are built on low-loss G.652.D fibre with dark fibre, spectrum and wavelength services available on both routes.
The Milan-Zurich (335km) cable is the final section of EXA Infrastructure’s Frankfurt-Zurich-Milan-Genoa corridor (circa 1,050km). It is said to be the first carrier-grade, low-loss G.652.D single operated cable across this Alps corridor.
It is attributed with delivering high-capacity, reliable connectivity between the Frankfurt and Milan datacentre hubs and the Genoa subsea ecosystem, significantly improving throughput on the route. The design is highly scalable, with hundreds of fibres and modular in-line amplifier sites that allow capacity to scale as demand grows.
At around 1,600km in length, Paris-Vienna is seen as an essential part of a longer corridor connecting London with the Balkans and Turkey, and onwards to the Middle East. It also enables new Paris-Frankfurt and Vienna-Frankfurt corridors on a platform engineered for long-term growth and supports transatlantic traffic from Western Europe into Frankfurt.
“With Milan-Zurich we have completed a corridor that gives Frankfurt, Milan and Genoa the high-capacity connectivity they need, and with Paris-Vienna we have strengthened the route from London to the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East,” said Steve Roberts, head of strategic investments and product management EXA. “Both are built to meet the demand our customers are planning for and extend our low-loss G.652.D footprint across Europe.”
The launch of the corridors follows that of EXA Infrastructure’s Bilbao-Barcelona route and the unveiling of EXA Meridian, the company’s ninth transatlantic cable system, which will be ready for service in 2029.
In addition, they follow EXA Infrastructure expanding its long-haul terrestrial network in 2025 with a route that directly connects Barcelona to Bilbao, looking to create an unbroken path between Atlantic cable systems, the Mediterranean and beyond, boosting network resilience for hyperscalers and content providers.
At launch, EXA said these terrestrial corridors will reduce cross-Spain latency by 52%, unlocking direct Atlantic access for subsea cables landing in the Mediterranean, creating a corridor that serves traffic flows from the Transatlantic to Mediterranean, Middle East, Africa and Asia.
The development was also regarded by EXA as marking a pivotal evolution for the Barcelona hub, repositioning it from a predominantly Mediterranean exchange point into a true east-west transatlantic connectivity gateway with “seamless” access to Atlantic and transatlantic cable systems.
