Malaysia’s Hexa Capital Consultancy said that it has chosen Globe Telecom to serve as the landing party in the Philippines for its trans-Pacific Malaysia-US (MYUS) Cable System.
The MYUS cable will run over 19,000 km from Sedili, Malaysia to Guam, and from there to Florence, Oregon, with landing points also planned for Batam, Jakarta and Balikpapan in Indonesia, and Davao City in the Philippines. Under the deal with Hexa, Globe will build the Davao City landing station.
According to the Philippine Star, Hexa founder and CEO Azhari Abang Hadari said the company picked Globe for its experience deploying infrastructure for the Philippine Domestic Submarine Cable Network (PDSCN), said to be the longest domestic subsea cable network in the Philippines.
Last week, Hexa named GTA Guam as its partner for the landing station in Guam. In September, Alaska Communications was named as the landing party in Oregon.
The MYUS cable is designed as a 16-fibre-pair system, each with a minimum capacity of 15 Tbps, for a total initial capacity of 240 Tbps.
Azhari said the MYUS cable will provide needed extra international capacity to support Malaysia’s growing data centre footprint that includes major hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Azhari also said the MYUS route avoids disputed waters in Southeast Asia to ensure its operational sustainability, the Star report said.
Malaysia currently connects to almost 20 international subsea cable systems, but of those, only the Asia-America Gateway (AAG) club cable connects to the US. The MYUS cable would be the first private subsea cable to serve that route. It also provides a more direct route, as the AAG detours through Hong Kong before heading out to the US coast.
Hexa says the cable project will cost an estimated US$720 million. The company expects to secure financing for the cable by the middle of next year, which would enable the system to be ready for service by mid-2028.
Hexa received a grant from the US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) in November 2023 to fund a feasibility study for the MYUS cable, which was conducted by T Soja & Associates.