Digital Realty to Build New Subsea Cable Landing Station in Los Angeles

Digital Realty said on 22 September 2026 that it will develop a new subsea cable landing station at its LAX12 data center in El Segundo, California, working with Assured Communications on design, engineering and construction. The company frames the site as a turnkey gateway for cable systems connecting Asia-Pacific to North America, with the station expected to begin supporting cables in 2028. No cable system, customer, or investment figure was named.

What is known

Per Digital Realty’s own press release, the planned cable landing station (CLS) will let subsea cable operators land and power their systems at LAX12 and connect onward into terrestrial networks, plus Digital Realty’s existing interconnection platform and roster of carriers, network operators and cloud providers on the campus. Assured Communications — named as the engineering and construction partner — is the same company that served as program manager on AWS-backed Toptana’s Ocean Shores, Washington cable landing station, which broke ground earlier this month; it is now working two separate transpacific-facing landing projects on the US West Coast at once.

Digital Realty CEO Andy Power’s quote in the release ties the project to the company’s broader Los Angeles campus, calling it a way to strengthen “intercontinental connectivity” there, while Assured Communications CEO Joel Ogren frames it explicitly as a new link between “Asia Pacific and North America.” Trade coverage from Fierce Network and SubTel Forum corroborates the partnership, the 2028 target, and the absence of a named cable system or disclosed cost — none of the outlets we checked found additional detail beyond the press release.

What this means for the buyer of power

LAX12 is not a new facility for us: it already sits in our global data center catalog as one of 20 Los Angeles-metro sites we track, in a US catalog of 925 facilities overall. Digital Realty alone runs three of those 20 LAX-area sites (LAX10, LAX11 and LAX12), on top of four Equinix IBX suites, three CoreSite buildings and a dozen smaller operators clustered around El Segundo and downtown LA’s One Wilshire — still the classic West Coast carrier hotel. A landing station does not add colocation megawatts to that cluster, but it does add a reason for cable operators and content networks to keep leasing there: connectivity gravity compounds, and LA’s role as the primary US gateway to Asia-Pacific traffic gets reinforced rather than diversified by this specific project, unlike AWS’s Sta’O’Nuk cable to Japan, which deliberately opened a new landing corridor in Washington state instead.

For buyers pricing US West Coast capacity against alternatives, our Colocation Price Index tracks North America wholesale power at roughly $196/kW per month with retail rack pricing in a $500-1,500/month range, up 6.5% year-on-year per CBRE’s H2 2025 data — figures that a connectivity announcement like this one does not move directly, but that any tenant chasing proximity to a new subsea gateway should weigh against cheaper, less connectivity-dense US markets. It is also a reminder that the diversification logic we flagged in our transpacific cable coverage cuts both ways: some hyperscale-backed projects spread landing risk across new corridors, while others, like this one, deepen an already-dominant hub. See our interconnection guide for how landing stations translate into the cross-connect economics that show up on a colocation invoice.

What we don’t know yet

Digital Realty has not disclosed which cable system, consortium, or single customer will use the new landing station, nor the project’s cost or a construction-start date. It is also unclear whether the station will be sized for one cable or built with spare capacity for multiple systems, the way Toptana’s Ocean Shores site was designed with four cable vaults and room to expand to sixteen.