Firmus Technologies has agreed to pay about US$300 million for up to 150 terabits per second of capacity on APX East, a submarine cable SUBCO plans to lay directly between Sydney and San Diego, the two Australian companies announced on Thursday. The cable does not yet exist. SUBCO's target for it to carry traffic is the last quarter of 2028.
The agreement makes Firmus what the companies call a cornerstone customer for 25 years. The capacity figure is a ceiling, "up to 150 terabits per second", and neither company has said how much of the money is equity in the cable and how much is prepaid capacity, or how many of the system's 16 fibre pairs Firmus takes. No Australian dollar figure was published; at Thursday's exchange rate the commitment is a little over A$400 million.
SUBCO, founded in Brisbane in 2016 by Bevan Slattery, announced APX East in January as an all-deepwater system with no intermediate landings between the two cities. It says the design will be the longest continuous optical path under any ocean and the longest able to be powered from one end if the other fails. Those are the designer's claims for a cable that has no announced manufacturer, no published marine survey, no Australian installation permit and no United States landing licence on the Federal Communications Commission's register. The company has not published a length; trade estimates put it at about 13,000 kilometres.
Firmus wants the capacity for what it calls AI factories: data centres it is building or planning at Launceston in Tasmania, in South Australia and, with Nvidia, at Batam in Indonesia. Its pitch is that the output of those sites, the tokens an AI model produces when it answers a query, is an export, and exports need a route out. "This is a 25-year investment in Australia's future," co-chief executive Tim Rosenfield said. "AI is fast becoming one of Australia's next major export industries, but that opportunity will only be realised if we invest in the infrastructure that underpins it."
Slattery framed the same problem from the other end in January. Hyperscalers and neoclouds were looking to deploy about three gigawatts of AI computing in Australia by 2028, he said then, and that would need between 75 and 150 terabits of international capacity. Firmus's ceiling on its own equals the top of that range. "With all the talk of AI factories, people are forgetting that the longest lead item for Australia isn't going to be power, land, data centers or chips," Slattery said at the time. "It's going to be international connectivity at AI scale."
Australia already has two cables to the United States and two more on the way. Southern Cross NEXT, in service since 2022, runs Sydney to Los Angeles through Auckland with 72 terabits of capacity. Hawaiki has linked Sydney to Oregon through American Samoa and Hawaii since 2018. Google's Tabua cable came ashore at Maroubra in February and is due to switch on this year, and its Honomoana system to San Diego, via Tahiti, is targeted for the end of 2026. Southern Cross markets NEXT as the first direct Australia-US cable; SUBCO's claim to that title rests on the absence of any landing or signal regeneration along the way.
There is no public money in the deal. Neither company's statement mentions a grant, a subsidy or a government partner, and no minister had issued a statement by Friday. Firmus closed a US$2 billion equity raise on 7 August with Coatue, Nvidia, Blackstone and Jane Street, at what the company said was a valuation above US$10.5 billion. It says it is headquartered in Sydney.
What is settled is the customer and the date. What is not is who will build the cable, what it will cost in total, where it will land north of Sydney, and when the permits will be applied for. SUBCO's nearer test is Bernacchi-1, the Tasmanian branch off its SMAP cable that Firmus also anchored, which it says will be in service in the second quarter of 2027.
