Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Amazon Ireland has applied for a maritime usage license to land a planned cable connecting Ireland to the United States. It is considering landing near Castlefreke on Ireland's South Coast in County Cork along a stretch of beach called the Strand. Amazon has made no public announcement so far. Here is the filed application: https://lnkd.in/dUF__j8V. I discovered this when I came across a local Irish newspaper that mentioned that Amazon was looking at a nearby beach for a cable landing. I then did a Google search and found the filing. All these filings are posted online and they are 'leading indicators' as economists would say of what is going to happen.  No subsea cables currently land on Ireland's South Coast other than EXA's Express and that is part of the reason that Amazon finds it so appealing. Such a cable would be physically diverse at least on the terrestrial side to the Irish Sea and older Atlantic cables like Hibernia North and South and AC1. I can never e...

The chart tells us that Ireland despite its low tax rates is quite costly with the highest power rates in the EU. It is often joked that a data centre is a power reseller and there's a lot of truth in that statement. For example, Equinix reports that power and cooling are 80% of its infrastructure operating expense. In general, a data centre's overall operating expense can be as much as 50% electricity. From what I can tell Irish data centre demand for electricity has grown much faster than the country's power capacity. Data centres consume 21% of Ireland's electricity versus 18% for households. This is an astonishing figure.  High German rates reflect the failed Energiewende. The system costs of wind and solar are extremely high in Germany and both sources are heavily subsidized via guaranteed tariffs because the load factors (annual capacity utilization rates) are very low. For example, a German solar farm only operates at 10% of capacity on an annual basis whereas Am...