September saw Exa Infrastructure launch its 4,071-mile (6,552-kilometer) Exa Meridian transatlantic subsea cable between North America and Europe. While Exa touted Meridian’s long-term capacity for both hyperscalers and neoclouds in the AI era, the company’s head of network investments revealed AI alone is not defining network topography, even as frontier AI labs match the hyperscale hold on fiber.

Steve Roberts, Exa SVP for strategic investment and product management, told this title that the biggest pre-orders on its Meridian cable are for entire dark-fiber pairs, which most of that diverse customer set will light independently using their own dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) equipment.

“But I wouldn't say it was unique to this cable,” Roberts revealed, highlighting to SDxCentral that its biggest customers buy such pairs, including hyperscalers that may be otherwise building their own cables.

“We do see a step increase in the capacity that they're buying from us, both in the subsea space, but also terrestrially," Roberts said. "But then we’ve seen new buyers under the AI umbrella, whether they're labs or model owners or GPU-as-a-service owners. I would say that certainly the larger model owners are starting to make very big investments that are comparable to what the hyperscalers have been doing over the last few years.”

In addition to traditional 10 Gb/s (10G), 100G, and 400G wavelength services, Exa offers fractional spectrum on the system, with customers at the “higher end with larger bandwidth requirements buying a few 100-gig wavelengths to buying spectrum,” thus garnering more control over Meridian’s optical layer.

“Even cloud and content-type customers are now looking at fiber pairs where they previously bought 100-gig wavelengths,” Roberts added.

Obviously, this is down to AI, which the executive said is “creating new traffic demands that are an outlier to what we've seen the trend to be over the past 20 years.”

“Network teams are being asked to procure far more bandwidth, far more pairs of fibers than they had previously been doing over the last 10 years,” Roberts explained.

Exa’s claims tally with recent Dell’Oro Group research reporting that revenue from direct purchases of WDM equipment for data center interconnects spiked nearly 40% in 2025, while direct cloud provider purchases overall rose about 50%.

Dell’Oro Group noted that while hyperscalers continued to account for the bulk of purchases, emerging neocloud providers were increasingly entering the market and spurring incremental demand. Overall, the global optical transport market returned to growth mode last year, climbing 10% year over year to reach $16 billion.

Data center pessimism defining network topography

Running between New Jersey in the U.S. and Brean in the U.K., Exa Meridian is scheduled to be ready for service in 2029, and will become the ninth transatlantic cable in the Exa portfolio.

Exa also recently expanded its network with a direct route in Spain connecting Barcelona to Bilbao, serving Zaragoza along the way, which it described as one of Europe’s fastest-growing AI and hyperscale data center regions.

These moves complement Exa’s expansion of its pan-European network to connect North America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa with European data centers. To support emerging traffic flows beyond the established FLAP data-center region, it is developing a new Berlin–Warsaw route to serve Poland’s growing data-center market and carry Nordic traffic into Europe, while also considering corridors from Western Europe through the Balkans into Turkey. Exa sees Middle Eastern traffic shifting from traditional routes intersecting Egypt in favor of routes via Iraq and Turkey.

Mention of some of these territories raised the obvious question of what impact current geopolitical tensions has on investment.

“We have to be aware of what's happening in Eastern Europe and in the Ukrainian direction, equally in the Middle East as well," Roberts said. "Some of this does create opportunities for us as well. … What we've seen over the last three years with the fact that submarine cables are not being able to be built in the Red Sea right now through a combination of the issues in Yemen and Djibouti, and that's opening up other traffic corridors where we expect that traffic to go through Iraq, for example, and into Turkey, or through Syria and into Turkey. So it's a constantly changing landscape.

"Now, a few years ago, you wouldn't have thought that anything would go through Syria, but actually, it's a positive outcome of the changes in Syria that actually seems to be opening up and is becoming a viable route out of the Middle East now," Roberts added.

But besides AI and geopolitics, planning regulation driven by data center pessimism is probably the overriding factor in deciding the topography of Exa’s networks. Roberts pointed to the Balkans as being “more straightforward” when it comes to permits, for example.

“There's less opposition there at the moment to data center projects. We're starting to see this pattern that in the more mature markets there seems to be this opposition to data centers now, and I think that's not something that they're experiencing in some of these newer developing markets. So I think it's really interesting that we could start to see some of these new AI factories actually moving east, just because they can build quicker and they can permit quicker," Roberts added.