Amazon seems to be on an investment spree lately. Shortly after penning down a deal to help build the U.S.'s first modular nuclear power reactor, the company is expanding the reach of its worldwide network, in the literal sense. The company has pulled the curtain back on Fastnet, a new intercontinental cable wiring Maryland, U.S., to County Cork, Ireland. The new fiber cable has a capacity of at least 320 Tb/s, or, as Amazon puts it, enough to transfer 12.5 million HD films per second.
The cable should be operational in 2028, though its main task appears to be to act as a backup and load-balancing route. The extra capacity will be welcome for services that rely on AWS wares like CloudFront, Global Accelerator, and presumably, good ol' S3. Future plans include adding another 10 Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions to its growing portfolio of connectivity and data centers.
