The announcement is less about adding capacity and more about changing what Barcelona is. Until now, the city functioned primarily as an aggregation point for subsea cables arriving from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Traffic that needed to continue west toward the Atlantic had limited routing options, which constrained resilience and added latency at a chokepoint in European connectivity.
The new Barcelona-Bilbao corridor removes that constraint. Bilbao sits on Spain’s Atlantic coast, adjacent to the cable systems that link Europe to North America. By owning fibre across the full route, EXA can now offer customers an end-to-end path from Mediterranean-landing subsea cables through to the transatlantic ecosystem, on infrastructure it controls.
The 52% latency reduction for cross-Spain routes is the operational number, but the resilience argument may matter more for enterprise buyers. Traffic that previously had limited routing options now has multiple distinct paths, which reduces single points of failure for hyperscalers, content providers, and AI platform operators running time-sensitive workloads across regions.
The route also directly serves Zaragoza, which EXA describes as one of Europe’s fastest-growing hyperscale and AI data centre regions. The Aragón region currently hosts major investment from AWS, Microsoft, and QTS, with more than 1.6GW of projected capacity by 2030. Placing high-performance connectivity at the nexus of that build-out and the transatlantic cable system is the commercial logic behind the routing choice.
Steve Roberts, senior vice president for strategic investments and product management at EXA Infrastructure, said: “Barcelona has always been a natural meeting point between East and West,” said Steve Roberts. “By extending our terrestrial long-haul footprint directly to the Atlantic corridor, we are giving our customers, and the subsea players that already land there, a genuinely shorter and more resilient path to transatlantic systems.”
EXA Infrastructure, a portfolio company of I Squared Capital, describes itself as one of the largest dedicated digital infrastructure platforms across Europe. The company connects the main eight data centres across Catalonia and has owned fibre presence in Barcelona from its earlier network build-out.
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