Int’l Bytes: AAE-2, Crusoe, Vantage, Orange Business

One subsea cable, two data center financings/expansions, and a couple of technology partnerships:

There will soon be another, more modern link from Europe to Asia. PCCW Global, Sparkle, Telecom Egypt, and ZOI hare signed an MoU to build the Asia-Africa-Europe-2 subsea cable system. The plans envision endpoints in Hong Kong and Italy, with terrestrial links in Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, and Thailand. It will be interesting to see the details of that route, though I’m sure it will evolve over time.

Crusoe is moving into Norway. The AI infrastructure provider is partnering with Polar to establish its first facility in Scandinavia, following up a buildout into Iceland. It will feature 12MW of hydroelectric power, with the ability to expand to 52Mw in the future. Also this week, Crusoe raised $750M from Brookfield.

Vantage Data Centers says it has raised €640M. The transaction is billed as the industry’s first Euro-based data center asset-backed securitization. They will use the funds to refinance two facilities in Offenbach, Frankfurt, and two in Berlin. They did something similar last year, but in British pounds sterling.

Orange Business has lined up two key technolgoy partnerships. They are working with NVIDIA to build out their AI capabilities, enabling the delivery of sovereign AI solutions in Europe. And they are teaming up with Toshiba Europe to launch quantum-safe networking in Paris. Orange Quantum Defender will use Toshiba’s Quantum Safe Networking technology, and the service is now commercially available.

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Categories: Artificial Intelligence · Datacenter · Financials · Quantum · Undersea cables