DC BLOX to build $100M subsea cable landing station in Palm Coast (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Southeast digital infrastructure provider DC BLOX is planning to construct a subsea cable landing station in Palm Coast — a multi-million-dollar facility that will host Google’s recently announced Sol cable and five others.
The Atlanta-headquartered organization is investing over $100 million in the project, said Chris Gatch, executive vice president and chief revenue officer of DC BLOX. Local leaders hope it will spur other digital infrastructure upgrades in the region.
“One of the largest exports of the United States is digital services,” Gatch said. “Our consumption of all digital services from around the globe, including financial transactions, rely on these cables. So I mean literally, our day to day lives are dependent on them.”
Google last week announced plans to construct a subsea cable extending to Santander, Spain that would be anchored in Palm Coast. Called Sol, that cable will be linked to DC BLOX’s landing campus.
It will be the only in-service fiber-optic cable between the Sunshine State and Europe, according to Google, and serve to strengthen digital connectivity.
“About 98% of global internet traffic goes across subsea cables,” said Gatch. “There’s only about 40 cables on the East Coast that really matter and probably half of those are aging out.”
This isn’t the first landing station DC BLOX has constructed. The organization in 2023 built a similar one in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and has invested more than $150 million in that location to-date, Gatch said.
It would have a similar impact in Palm Coast, he said: “this kind of infrastructure tends to attract other digital infrastructure.”
Project leaders aim for the campus to reside on a 34 acre parcel of vacant land at 1035 Town Center Blvd., break ground later this year, and be operational in quarter one of 2027. DcB Orchid LLC, owned by DC BLOX, bought that land for $3.3 million in 2023, according to county records.
The campus will take the form of two cable landing stations: one to house Google’s Sol cable and the other to house the rest. Seventy-million-dollars is being invested in the first building by DC BLOX, plus another $40 million to $50 million in the second building, Gatch said.
That money will cover vertical construction of the campus itself and underground infrastructure development.
Each building will span under 100,000 square feet and the total power capacity of the campus will be “no more than 10 megawatts of utility power,” Gatch said.
The scope of development will include the buildings themselves and a conduit system running underground from the campus all the way to 2,000 feet from shore where cables will be funneled through, Gatch said.
“(The cable landing station) really positions us as a strategic gateway in the high tech sector in Northeast Florida,” said Craig McKinney, economic development manager of Palm Coast. “It really puts a spotlight on us as being a digital infrastructure hub.”
Logo courtesy of Business Wire