AWS Backs New Transpacific Cable Sta'O'Nuk, Landing Station Breaks Ground in Washington

AWS announced on 2 September 2026 that it is backing Sta’O’Nuk, a new 420 Tbps transpacific subsea cable linking Ocean Shores, Washington, to Japan, targeted to enter service in 2029. The same day, landing-station developer Toptana Technologies broke ground on the cable’s US landing site — the first new international subsea cable landing point in Washington state in nearly 30 years.

What is known

Per AWS’s own blog post, Sta’O’Nuk will carry 20 fiber pairs and 420 Tbps of capacity, and will integrate into the AWS Global Network to support workloads including distributed AI training, financial transactions, and video streaming. AWS frames the route as diversification: existing transpacific cables cluster around a small number of landing corridors — Central California and Oregon on the US side, and the Shima and Chiba peninsulas on the Japan side — concentrating risk if any one corridor is damaged. Landing in Ocean Shores instead spreads that exposure. AWS did not disclose the cable’s cost, its exact landing point in Japan, or how much of its capacity will be reserved for AWS’s own use versus sold or leased to others.

The physical build on the US side is being handled by Toptana, a company established in 2022 by the Quinault Indian Nation. Per Toptana’s own press release via GlobeNewswire, the Ocean Shores landing station broke ground on 2 September 2026 with a planned 17,700 square feet of space, Tier III design, 1 MW of day-one power capacity, and four subsea cable vaults with room to expand to sixteen — meaning the site is built to host additional cable systems beyond Sta’O’Nuk. Assured Communications is named as program manager and long-term operations partner. Trade coverage from DCD and Converge Digest corroborates the capacity, fiber-pair count, and 2029 target date reported in AWS’s post.

What this means for the buyer of power

Subsea cables rarely make it into a colocation buyer’s spreadsheet, but they set the ceiling on how much bandwidth a region can actually use. Japan is the second-largest market in our data center catalog after the US, with 41 tracked facilities, and its pricing already runs well above regional peers — commercial power there sits around $0.201/kWh, roughly double typical Southeast Asian levels, per our Colocation Price Index notes. A new, geographically separate transpacific route does not change that power math, but it does reduce the chance that a single cable fault forces traffic onto already-congested corridors and degrades the latency figures we track on our latency matrix.

The diversification logic here is the same one that made headlines closer to our home region in late August, when four separate subsea systems serving Vietnam — SJC2, AAE-1, AAG, and TGN Intra Asia — faulted within days of each other, degrading international connectivity for the country’s data center tenants. Sta’O’Nuk does not touch Southeast Asia directly, but it is part of the same broader pattern: hyperscalers are increasingly funding or co-owning cable capacity rather than relying solely on shared consortium systems, a trend we also cover in our interconnection guide.

What we don’t know yet

AWS has not named Sta’O’Nuk’s landing point in Japan, disclosed the project’s cost, or said how capacity will be split between AWS’s internal use and third-party lease. Toptana’s landing station is also designed to host up to three additional cable systems beyond Sta’O’Nuk, but none of those have been named or confirmed.