Thursday Roundup: Sparkle, Colt, Ciena, HydraVault, Applied Digital

A subsea branch, a network upgrade, and two data center project updates:

Sparkle says that the BlueMed cable system has come ashore in Cyprus, specifically at Cyta’s Yeroskipos landing station. The subsea cable is part of the Blue and Raman project, which is backed by Google connecting Italy with India. BlueMed’s portion already handles the Mediterranean portion, and this new branch will bring significant new connectivity to Cyprus. Last year they did the same thing to land in Crete.

Colt and Ciena have teamed up to feed more bandwidth to two global content providers. They have rolled out a terabit transatlantic and terrestrial network to help the hyperscalers meet demand from AI while lowering power consumption and carbon emissions. The project leveraged Ciena’s WL6e technology to increase capacity by 20% on a single fiber. The upgrades were made on the Grace Hopper subsea cable and between Lisbon and Madrid.

HydraVault says it has secured a construction permit for its plans in downtown Chicago. They will be starting construction immediately on a next-generation data center fed by 20MW of facility power. The result will be a block of AI-enabled white space within the ‘lowest possible latency’ to the iconic 350 Cermak carrier hotel. Hydravault anticipates early user access in December of next year.

And Applied Digital announced earlier this week that the first phase of its Polaris Forge 1 AI Factory Campus is ready for service. That’s the one in Ellendale, North Dakota, and phase 1 is a 50MW of the initial 100MW building. The hyperscale tenant is CoreWeave, for whom they will be scaling things up to 400MW under a 15-year lease agreement. The second 50MW should be ready before the end of next year.

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Categories: Datacenter · Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables