Update On Pisces Project: Ireland/Continental Europe Cable With UK Bypass

I spoke very briefly with Tom McMahon at SubOptic 2025, whose design and civil engineering company has almost a 100% market share of Irish subsea fibre optic cable projects. Tom is spearheading an effort as an entrepreneur in conjunction with Orange to build the first Irish fibre optic subsea cable to bypass the UK and directly connect hyperscaler Ireland to the European Continent. Pisces has received two rounds of funding from the EU to financed research and design of the proposed cable. Frankly, I suspect the EU loves this project since it reduces the dependency of the Irish data centers on traversing the UK to reach EU member states. According to Tom, it's fully funded. Furthermore, the plan to sell all the fibres on the system and provide no lit services itself. My hunch is that it is partially funded, but is likely to get the money it needs and be built. I wish Tom and his team the best of luck. It's a cool project.

Amazon just announced it is creating a separate European entity for its European digital sovereignty cloud market. I don't know whether they would be an anchor tenant, but AWS would definitely want capacity on the system. My prediction is that Microsoft, AWS, Facebook, and Microsoft would all take a fibre pair IRU on the system. Not clear there is enough demand to book all the capacity as dark fibre sales. Be interesting to see how this unfolds. The initial plan was an 8 fibre pair system. 

An interesting feature of the current design is that it ties together many subsea cables. All the cables landing at Lisbon could forward traffic to Ireland via a Galway landing. The Icelandic cable IRIS lands at Galway and it is likely that Amazon' yet unname US-Ireland subsea network will land near Galway as well. The drawing below suggests that Pisces will connect to Anjana and Marea in Northern Spain as well as Bordeaux and the Dunant landing at Saint-Hillaire-de-Riez.