Petabit submarine cable infrastructure has become the defining connectivity challenge of the late 2020s, and a little-known company called IOEMA Fibre is now positioning itself at the centre of Europe’s answer. IOEMA Fibre announced plans at the Submarine Networks EMEA Conference in London for a new high-capacity subsea cable — IOEMA-1 — stretching 1,400 km between the UK and Norway, routed via the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, with an overall projected capacity of 1.3 Pbps. A petabit submarine cable refers to a subsea fibre system capable of transmitting data at petabit-per-second scale — roughly one million gigabits per second — a threshold that only a handful of cable projects worldwide are approaching. According to IOEMA’s CTO Eckhard Bruckschen, the project has been in planning since 2019, though it is only now surfacing publicly as financing discussions intensify.
Key Takeaways
- IOEMA-1 is a planned 1,400 km subsea cable with a projected capacity of 1.3 Pbps across 48 fibre pairs.
- Each fibre pair is expected to deliver 27–29 Tbps, making this one of the highest-density designs announced in the North Sea region.
- IOEMA aims to close financing in 2025, begin construction in 2026, and go live in late 2027.
- The cable will land in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, and Norway, with partners including Colt, Eurofiber, QTS, and EWE.
- The project is pitched as a replacement for ageing cables including SeaMeWe-3, TAT-14, and CANTAT-3, which have been decommissioned or are approaching end-of-life.
What Makes IOEMA-1’s Design Stand Out?
IOEMA-1’s 48 fibre pairs, each projected to carry 27–29 Tbps, give the cable a theoretical aggregate capacity of 1.3 Pbps — a figure that places it among the most ambitious subsea designs announced for the European region. That density matters. Most existing North Sea cables were designed in an era when terabit-scale capacity felt generous; a petabit submarine cable at this specification would represent a generational leap over the infrastructure it is intended to replace.
The route itself is strategically logical. Landing in Dumpton Gap in Southeast England — a site with an established Cable Landing Station that previously hosted the Tangerine and Pan-European Crossing cables — the system then touches the Netherlands at a CLS that formerly hosted the VSNL/TGN Northern Europe cable, before terminating at QTS’s Eemshaven data centre. Germany gets a new CLS in Wilhelmshaven on the north coast, courtesy of landing partner EWE. Norway’s endpoint is a new CLS at Bulk’s campus in Kristiansand, connecting onward to Bulk’s domestic fibre network. Every landing point is either an established cable hub or a purpose-built facility — which reduces construction risk considerably, at least on paper.
How Does IOEMA-1 Compare to Ageing North Sea Cables?
The cables IOEMA-1 is positioned to replace — SeaMeWe-3, TAT-14, and CANTAT-3 — belong to a different technological era. These systems have been decommissioned or are approaching end-of-life, and the capacity gap they leave is real. IOEMA-1’s 1.3 Pbps design dwarfs what those older cables could ever have delivered, but the comparison also highlights the risk: IOEMA is pitching a replacement, not filling a proven commercial void that existing operators have failed to address.
That distinction matters when assessing the project’s credibility. The North Sea route is not underserved — it has attracted investment from established operators for decades. What IOEMA is arguing is that the next wave of demand, driven by AI workloads and hyperscale data centre growth, will outpace what existing and already-planned cables can handle. That argument is plausible, but it is a forecast, not a fact. The company is still seeking an anchor customer, which tells you something about where the project actually stands commercially.
Is the IOEMA-1 Timeline Realistic for a petabit submarine cable?
IOEMA’s stated timeline — financing closed in 2025, construction starting 2026, go-live in late 2027 — is aggressive for a project of this scale. Subsea cable builds of this complexity typically take years from financing to deployment, and that assumes no permitting delays, no supply chain disruption, and a smooth anchor customer negotiation. The fact that planning began in 2019 and the project is only now entering its financing phase suggests the path has not been straightforward.
Still, late 2027 is not impossible. The landing infrastructure at Dumpton Gap and the Netherlands site already exists, which removes some of the longest-lead-time elements from the critical path. New CLSs in Wilhelmshaven and Kristiansand add complexity, but both are described as purpose-built rather than retrofitted, which can sometimes move faster. The real variable is financing. Without an anchor customer locked in, closing a round in 2025 will require investors to bet on demand materialising rather than demand already proven — a harder pitch in a tightening infrastructure funding environment.
Europe’s Broader Race for High-Capacity Subsea Infrastructure
IOEMA-1 does not exist in isolation. The TechRadar report that surfaced this project frames it explicitly within a global race involving Meta and Japan to deploy petabit-class subsea capacity before 2030. The details of those competing efforts are not elaborated in the available source material, but the framing is credible: hyperscale operators and national connectivity programmes worldwide are all confronting the same structural problem — AI-driven data demand is growing faster than existing cable capacity was designed to accommodate.
Europe has particular strategic reasons to care about this. Connectivity between the UK and continental Europe, and between Northern Europe and the broader internet backbone, runs through exactly the kind of ageing infrastructure that IOEMA-1 targets. A 1.3 Pbps cable landing across four countries with established data centre partners is, at minimum, a serious attempt to address a real infrastructure gap — even if the company behind it remains relatively unknown publicly.
What is a petabit submarine cable and why does it matter now?
A petabit submarine cable is a subsea fibre system capable of transmitting data at petabit-per-second speeds — equivalent to one quadrillion bits per second. The threshold matters now because AI model training, inference workloads, and hyperscale data replication are generating cross-border data flows that existing terabit-class cables struggle to handle at scale. IOEMA-1’s 1.3 Pbps design is one of the first announced for the North Sea region at this capacity level.
Who are the key partners behind IOEMA-1?
IOEMA-1’s confirmed landing partners are Colt in the UK, Eurofiber and QTS in the Netherlands, EWE in Germany, and Bulk in Norway. The cable will terminate at QTS’s Eemshaven data centre. Beyond these partners and CTO Eckhard Bruckschen, little else is publicly known about IOEMA Fibre Ltd’s ownership structure or broader investor base at this stage.
When will IOEMA-1 be operational?
IOEMA Fibre is targeting a late 2027 go-live date, with financing expected to close in 2025 and construction beginning in 2026. These are targets, not confirmed milestones — the project is still seeking an anchor customer, and financing has not yet closed. Delays in either area would push the operational date beyond 2027.
IOEMA-1 is a genuinely ambitious project with a credible technical design and well-chosen landing partners — but it remains a project, not a cable. The 1.3 Pbps capacity figure is compelling, the route makes strategic sense, and the case for replacing ageing North Sea infrastructure is real. What IOEMA needs now is an anchor customer and a closed financing round. Until those two things happen, the late 2027 go-live date is an aspiration. Watch the 2025 financing milestone closely — that’s the moment this either becomes a serious infrastructure story or a cautionary tale about the gap between announced capacity and deployed cable.
Edited by the All Things Geek team.
Source: TechRadar
