Exa Infrastructure kicked off the new year by acquiring subsea firm Aqua Comms.

The deal, completed almost a year after an agreement was first struck, will see Exa add integral subsea links from Aqua Comms to its portfolio, which already covers more than 99,000 miles.

The Irish-based firm is the owner/operator of several major cable systems, including America Europe Connect lines one and two, and CeltixConnect-1 (CC-1) and CeltixConnect-2 (CC-2). The newly acquired firm is also part of the consortium that owns/operates the transatlantic Amitié cable system (AEC-3) spanning the U.S. East Coast to the data center hub of Slough, just outside London.

Exa said its acquisition of Aqua Comms will help it offer greater route diversity and critical links between the U.S. and mainland Europe.

“With the acquisition now complete, Exa Infrastructure has significantly enhanced our Transatlantic and European connectivity offerings,” Exa CEO Jim Fagan said. “Customers will benefit from unrivaled route diversity enhanced resiliency across a unified, meshed subsea and terrestrial network.”

Exa offered no confirmation as to the financial details of the deal. However, reports from when the initial agreement broke suggest that the net proceeds of the transaction were around $48 million, a figure former Aqua Comms parent Digital 9 Infrastructure (D9) described at the time to be “extremely disappointing.”

D9 was only founded in 2021 and sought to acquire a number of digital infrastructure firms, only to instead move to wind down its operations and sell off its assets following a strategic review in February 2024.

Exa was the party that won the race for Aqua Comms, with the deal adding to a series of recent investments as the firm looks to build out infrastructure links capable of supporting AI and cloud workloads.

In October, Exa unveiled plans for a new 400G route connecting the data center hub of Ashburn, Virginia, to Atlanta. The planned land route will traverse the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, tapping coherent technology from Ciena to create an AI-capable corridor between the two hubs, which then joins its transatlantic routes to Europe.