Digital Realty announced on September 22 a plan to build a cable landing station inside its LAX12 data center in El Segundo, California, developed in partnership with subsea infrastructure specialist Assured Communications. The station is designed as a turnkey solution for subsea cable operators and is targeted at Asia-Pacific to North America routes, with operations expected to begin in 2028. Craig Waldrop, Digital Realty's vice president of strategy and business development, described the project as the company's first turnkey cable landing solution and said the goal is to create a more direct connection between arriving subsea capacity and terrestrial networks, clouds, and carriers. The carrier-neutral design means cable operators will not be tied to a single network or cloud provider.
Embedding a cable landing station inside an existing data center collapses the traditional separation between subsea landing infrastructure and interconnection environments, potentially shortening the path from oceanic fiber to cloud on-ramps and reducing the number of hand-off points. This model, also pursued by hyperscalers like AWS for its Sta'O'Nuk cable, reflects a broader structural shift in how international bandwidth reaches end customers, with direct implications for network latency, capacity pricing, and competitive positioning among data center operators in coastal markets.
Digital Realty's LAX12 facility positioning itself around in-data-center subsea cable landings is a notable infrastructure strategy story involving a major REIT and a differentiated facility design that has implications for interconnection markets.