Orange, MDM and Equitix Build EU Data Sovereignty Cable Around Post-Brexit UK

Three partners—Orange, McMahon Design and Management Ltd (MDM), and Equitix—have formed a joint venture to build PISCES, a deep-water optical cable system that creates a direct link between Ireland and continental Europe across the Atlantic seaboard. The project sidesteps reliance on post-Brexit UK terrestrial backhaul, a routing pattern that historically carried over 90% of international data leaving Ireland. The European Union's Connecting Europe Facility (CEF-Digital) has committed €48.4 million in grants, covering approximately 37.1% of the system's total capital expenditure against a recognized eligible project cost of €130.4 million.

The financing structure reflects a shift in subsea cable development away from traditional carrier consortiums toward public-private partnerships that blend non-dilutive public funding with institutional infrastructure investment. This model allows PISCES Cable System Limited to operate as an independent, carrier-neutral wholesaler rather than serving the interests of a single operator or group of carriers.

Origins and Strategic Rationale

Dublin-based MDM, a marine engineering and subsea cable consultancy, conceived PISCES in response to structural vulnerabilities in Western Europe's digital infrastructure that emerged after the UK's departure from the European Union. The company, working through its affiliated project development vehicle Deep Sea Fibre Networks Ltd, began conceptualizing the system between 2020 and 2022. Formal project work commenced on January 1, 2023, following approval of initial funding under CEF-Digital Call 1. Orange joined as an industrial and operating partner in 2024, with Equitix arriving as the lead financial sponsor, following completion of early marine surveys and award of consecutive EU deployment grants.

MDM identified three core problems that PISCES addresses. First, Ireland's cloud infrastructure—which hosts major European operations for AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Meta—faced regulatory friction and jurisdictional risk by routing data through UK territory under post-Brexit conditions, creating exposure under EU data protection rules. Second, the traditional shallow-water routes through the Irish Sea, Dover Strait, and English Channel are congested maritime chokepoints vulnerable to accidental cable cuts from fishing trawls, dredging, and vessel anchors, as well as potential gray-zone interference. Third, legacy routing funneled traffic toward congested metropolitan peering hubs in London and Paris rather than enabling direct access to intercontinental landing stations along the Atlantic coast.

By routing along the outer Atlantic continental shelf, PISCES maximizes water depth to reduce physical risk and creates a direct bridge from Ireland into key landing stations that connect to transatlantic, Latin American, and African subsea trunks.

Corporate Structure and Governance

The sponsors established PISCES Cable System Limited as a special-purpose operating and investment entity incorporated in Ireland under Companies Registration Office number 806903. The company was originally incorporated on January 26, 2026, and formally renamed and recapitalized on July 16, 2026, ahead of the public joint-venture announcement. Its registered office is located at 27 Upper Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin 2, D02 TP23, Ireland. Carine Romanetti, who previously headed international subsea networks and infrastructure strategy at Orange, was appointed Chief Executive Officer.

Orange provides wholesale carrier expertise, operates landing facilities in France and Spain, and delivers specialized marine engineering through subsidiaries Orange Marine and Elettra Tlc, which completed the comprehensive marine route survey in August 2026. Equitix, a major global infrastructure investment firm, supplies core infrastructure equity and financial management, with its balance-sheet backing reducing the asset's weighted average cost of capital and establishing a low-risk public-private project-finance structure. MDM Subsea directs territorial marine licensing, environmental impact assessments, shore-end engineering, and municipal approvals in Ireland.

EU Grant Funding and Beneficiaries

The European Commission's Connecting Europe Facility (CEF-Digital), managed by the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA), awarded the €48.4 million in non-dilutive public grants. The grant corresponds to a recognized eligible project base of €130.4 million. Three entities are formally recognized as beneficiaries and grant recipients under the executed HaDEA grant agreements: McMahon Design and Management Limited (serving as project coordinator), Deep Sea Fibre Networks Limited (an MDM affiliate and consortium partner), and Orange SA (consortium partner). This grant funding absorbed high-risk front-end capital expenses and provided the bankability needed to attract institutional equity from Equitix.

Technical Design and Strategic Positioning

PISCES is engineered as an open-access wet plant designed to support high-capacity, low-latency coherent transmission using Spatial Division Multiplexing (SDM). The system will deploy 16 fiber pairs under an open-access model, allowing cloud providers and AI research institutions to lease dedicated unlit dark fiber or spectrum and attach their own coherent transponders.

The cable's routing strategy creates a lateral mesh of intercontinental landing gateways rather than funneling traffic toward traditional metropolitan hubs. Landing points include Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez in France, which serves as a landfall for major transatlantic systems including Google's Dunant and the AMITIÉ cable; Sopelana in Bilbao, Spain, which connects to the 200+ Tbps MAREA system and the Madrid data center ecosystem; and Carcavelos in Lisbon, Portugal, which bridges to South America via EllaLink and sub-Saharan Africa via systems such as 2Africa and Google's Equiano. This mesh architecture allows transatlantic and African workloads to land on the European perimeter and route into Ireland or Southern Europe without traversing congested central European transit corridors.

Data Sovereignty and Infrastructure Resilience

PISCES establishes an unencumbered all-EU optical highway that keeps intra-EU data payloads entirely within EU territorial waters and single-market legal frameworks. This approach eliminates long-term compliance exposure, cross-border tariff risks, and jurisdictional disputes associated with UK backhaul transit. By running through deep Atlantic waters off the continental shelf rather than shallow waterways like the English Channel, the cable provides physical security against accidental cable cuts from commercial fishing vessels, cargo traffic, and heavy anchor activity—which account for the vast majority of accidental subsea cable cuts globally. The deep-water route also insulates pan-European traffic from gray-zone physical infrastructure sabotage.

AI Infrastructure and Capacity Model

The rapid expansion of distributed AI training clusters demands unprecedented optical bandwidth, as modern AI workflows rely on massive parameter synchronization and continuous dataset ingestion across geographically dispersed availability zones. By offering dark fiber and spectrum leasing under an open-access model, PISCES allows tenants to scale multi-terabit capacity at marginal cost without managing lit-capacity bandwidth caps imposed by traditional carrier models.

With marine surveys completed in late summer 2026, corporate restructuring finalized, and permitting underway, PISCES Cable System Limited is positioned to deliver a critical Atlantic optical backbone that resolves post-Brexit transit chokepoints, secures long-term digital sovereignty for the European Union, and provides resilient infrastructure for next-generation cloud and artificial intelligence computing.