Facebook's subsea cable subsidary, Edge Cable Holdings, has petitioned the FCC to land a new cable at the NJIX data center in Wall Township, New Jersey. The cable lands in Europe at an Arelion owned facility in Blaabjerg, Denmark. META uses both NJIX and the Arelion facility for the power feed equipment, but is installing the submarine line termination equipment, which includes the lasers and electronics at a Piscataway carrier neutral data center and its Danish counterpart, an unnamed Esbjerg site.
Facebook currently owns two fiber pairs on the consortium AEC-2 subset network linking the US and Denmark. AEC-2 has exactly the same end points as Aurora. Hyperscaler traffic has grown so rapidly that consortium membership in many cases simply makes no economic sense. Most hyperscalers need all the capacity that a cable provides and hence sole ownership as emerged as the most economic business model.
We know very little about Aurora given the confidentially restrictions on the FCC application. It is a 24 fibre pair network designed to transmit 497 Tbps per second. This makes the highest capacity Trans-Atlantic in operation and the new record holder.
