NEC announced that it has finished building the Asia Direct Cable (ADC), an intra-Asia subsea cable connecting China, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
The 9,400-km cable system – which was declared ready for service on Wednesday – is designed to carry over 160 Tbps of traffic over eight fibre pairs across the East and Southeast Asian regions.
The club cable is owned by the ADC Consortium, which comprises China Telecom, China Unicom, National Telecom (NT), PLDT, Singtel, SoftBank, Tata Communications and Viettel.
The consortium tapped NEC to build the ADC cable in 2020. The cable was initially scheduled for completion by the end of 2022, only to take longer than expected for a variety of reasons, often related to bureaucratic permit processes, according to media reports.
In any case, the arrival of the ADC cable is well timed, as it was initially conceived as a high-capacity cable to support growing regional demand for bandwidth-intensive applications driven by increasing adoption of 5G, the cloud, IoT and artificial intelligence.
That demand has ramped up considerably in 2024 as countries around southeast Asia have seen heavy investments in hyperscale data centres designed to support AI.
“We are confident that this cable system will significantly contribute to the development of the AI industry in the Asia region," said Koji Ishii, MC chairperson of the ADC Consortium.
Consortium co-chair Billy Li said the ADC cable “offers the greatest cable capacity and essential diversity required for Asia's major information hubs, enabling telecom carriers and service providers to optimize their network and service planning for sustainable growth.”