In a move that is said to have resulted in creating an unbroken path between Atlantic cable systems, the Mediterranean and beyond, boosting network resilience for hyper-scalers and content providers, EXA Infrastructure has expanded its long-haul terrestrial network with a route that directly connects Barcelona to Bilbao.
EXA claims to be the owner and operator of the largest dedicated digital infrastructure network across Europe and the Atlantic. With more than 20 years of experience in building resilient networks, EXA provides networks for governments and enterprises; hyperscale infrastructure for global businesses; and ultra-low latency, high-bandwidth networks for financial, gaming and broadcast services. The company owns 155,000km of fibre network across 37 countries, including six transatlantic cables, and claims the lowest latency link between Europe and North America.
It says the new 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 is 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.
EXA Infrastructure now connects the main eight datacentres across Catalonia, and it says the “unique” combination of owned fibre infrastructure and embedded DC presence has long made Barcelona a critical aggregation point for subsea cables in the Mediterranean.
For hyperscalers, the result is said to be that content providers and AI platform operators relying on subsea cable capacity arriving from the Middle East, Africa and Asia can see Barcelona as no longer simply a landing and aggregation point. That is, it is now a direct route to the transatlantic ecosystem. Traffic that previously had limited routing options across Spain can now traverse multiple distinct paths, reduce single points of failure and improve overall network resilience.
The route also serves the burgeoning Zaragoza region directly, positioning high-performance connectivity at what EXA says is the heart of one of Europe’s fastest-growing AI and hyperscale datacentre regions. It will place new datacentre resources at the nexus of Lisbon and Madrid traffic flows to the rest of Europe, and now transatlantic traffic to Mediterranean-facing locations.
EXA believes that Zaragoza has emerged as one of Europe’s fastest-growing hyperscale and AI datacentre hubs. It noted that it is now anchored by major investments from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and QTS, and the Aragón region is on track to become one of the continent’s largest datacentre markets, with more than 1.6GW of projected capacity by 2030.
With the addition of the new long-haul terrestrial route, EXA assured that its end-to-end platform now creates an unbroken, high-performance path that brings those cables measurably closer to North America.
“Barcelona has always been a natural meeting point between East and West,” said Steve Roberts, senior vice-president of strategic investments and product management at EXA Infrastructure. “By extending our terrestrial long-haul footprint directly to the Atlantic corridor, we are giving our customers, and the subsea players that already land there, a genuinely shorter and more resilient path to transatlantic systems.”
