Globalinx to add new subsea cable landing site in Va. Beach

Virginia Beach will have four more subsea bore pipes in Sandbridge by the third quarter of 2023, infrastructure that will allow more high-speed subsea cables connecting Virginia to Europe, Asia, the Caribbean and the Americas, the city announced Friday.

Virginia Beach-based Globalinx Subsea Colocation provides colocation space for MAREA, BRUSA and DUNANT high-speed subsea telecommunication cables in the Corporate Landing Business Park, connecting Virginia with Spain, Puerto Rico, Brazil and France. The four new subsea bore pipes, which will connect directly to Globalinx’s campus. City and Virginia Marine Resource Commission permits are now in place, and construction is set to start in November, the city said in a release Friday.

Once the pipes are built, Corporate Landing Business Park will be connected to two terrestrial subsea landing routes.

Virginia Beach gains revenue directly from the cable conduits because Globalinx paid a $200,000 fee for right-of-way to the oceanfront landing sites, said Ray White, the city’s business development coordinator. The company and city are also working on a franchise agreement for the right-of-way from the beach manholes to the cable landing station.

The cable sites will be attractive to data centers, White said. The city is currently negotiating with five companies.

Virginia Beach is also looking to attract end users in the financial services and telemedicine industries, because both industries need and want almost instantaneous data transfer.

“The thing about these data center and end-user projects is they would generate very good investment for the city that would allow us to keep our overall tax rates very reasonable, but they’re very expensive projects overall,” White said.

Globalinx operates a 10,750-square-foot carrier-neutral data center on its 21.5-acre campus that provides a “meet me room” where providers and internet carriers can connect.

The four conduits will allow the company to expand its business model, Globalinx founder and President Greg Twitt said.

“I think it’s a good opportunity for us to be able to do this,” Twitt said, “and because it’s getting a lot tighter [in the ocean] and a lot harder to be able to achieve what we’ve achieved here today, and the demand is very high for subsea cables,” the company might have missed the opportunity to establish the sites if it had waited.

Many current subsea cables are reaching the end of their roughly 25-year lifecycles and will need to be replaced with newer cables capable of carrying more data. With available connections, Virginia Beach might be able to draw companies from their current sites on the Eastern seaboard when the time for replacements comes.