Digital Realty to build a cable landing station at its El Segundo data center

Digital Realty is building a cable landing station at LAX12, its El Segundo data center, with a 2028 target for supporting subsea cables, and Assured Communications is handling design, engineering and construction. The company has not said how many cables will actually terminate there.

LAX12 is a modest building for a company that trades on scale: two stories, 129,000 square feet, roughly 7MW of capacity, at 2260 East El Segundo Boulevard. It opened in 2005 under developer 365 Main, passed to Digital Realty in 2010, and sits near LAX11; the company runs four Los Angeles facilities in all, plus a 5.4-acre Vernon parcel acquired last year for future development. A landing station turns those Los Angeles facilities into a gate, because subsea traffic must terminate somewhere with cross-connects, and the landlord holding the termination point sells the connections and the colocation that follows—the ordinary argument for owning landing infrastructure.

“This development reflects our continued focus on expanding Digital Realty’s role in supporting global connectivity,” said president and CEO Andy Power. Pairing subsea landing infrastructure with the company’s interconnection and data center platform, he said, strengthens connectivity across the Los Angeles campus and gives customers a more scalable environment for connecting across regions.

Digital’s recent pattern favors acquiring the scarce input over building it. Earlier this month the company took a joint-venture position in Ankara that was effectively buying a permitting queue; in El Segundo it is buying engineering from a specialist. Los Angeles is a landing point for multiple current and planned cables linking the United States to Asia, Australia and South America, which is the demand case for owning a landing point here rather than letting a third party own it.

Other landing projects are moving on the same coast, including the AWS-backed Sta’O’Nuk cable planned for Washington State, which would give that region its first international landing in nearly 30 years, per this publication’s reporting, and would do so through a partnership with the Quinault Indian Nation. “Projects like this are reshaping how global infrastructure is deployed and connected,” said Joel Ogren, founder and CEO of Assured Communications, citing his firm’s experience in subsea cable systems and landing infrastructure development.

Which systems actually land is what decides whether the 2028 date holds, and subsea schedules slip. A landing station earns its keep only when cables terminate in it. For LAX12 the test will be a cable contract, not a groundbreaking.