Midgard Plans Sweden-Finland Subsea Cable

Publication Staff, Midgard Infra
October 8, 2026

Midgard Infra, formerly Altibox Carrier, announced on October 8 that it plans to extend its recently announced Oslo to Stockholm long-haul fibre route into Finland through a new subsea crossing. The extension is intended to establish a continuous, physically diverse corridor connecting Norway, Sweden and Finland, bringing the terrestrial route and the planned marine segment together under one operator for carriers, hyperscalers and data centre operators.

The subsea segment is planned to span approximately 200 kilometres, with landings on the coast northeast of Stockholm and in southwest Finland. It will carry 144 fibre pairs and use an unrepeatered design, keeping active components onshore. Midgard says this approach will simplify maintenance and restoration. The system is also intended to support high-capacity dense wavelength division multiplexing deployments, with headroom for next-generation optical technologies as demand develops.

Physical separation is central to the proposed corridor. According to Midgard, the Finnish extension is being engineered to share no landing point, cable or right-of-way with existing systems serving Sweden and Finland. The company says it has mapped existing infrastructure across the corridor and will ensure the extension avoids common points of failure with incumbent systems. This carries the diversity-first principle of the Oslo to Stockholm route across the subsea section.

The project addresses connectivity requirements associated with Finland’s expanding hyperscale and colocation market. Midgard points to renewable power availability, a cool climate and demand for low-latency Nordic connectivity as drivers of that development. It also highlights Finland’s selection to host one of the European Union’s designated AI factories and the network demands of growing AI training and inference capacity. An independent route into Finland would provide an additional connectivity option as that infrastructure develops, addressing the route concentration risk identified by the company.

Midgard is already engaging prospective customers for the Finnish extension and is offering duct, indefeasible right of use, or IRU, and leased capacity agreements. Its commercial team is inviting discussions on early access, site connectivity and capacity pre-commitments. The next announced construction milestone remains ahead: construction is scheduled to commence in early 2027, and the system is expected to enter service in 2029. Those dates are the stated schedule and service expectation, rather than completed milestones.

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