Two New Cables, One Landing Country
MDM, the Irish infrastructure firm behind an existing cable landing station in Galway, announced on August 11, 2026 that it will build two new transatlantic systems. Narwhal 1 links Galway to a landing point on Long Island, New York; Narwhal 2 connects a new station on Ireland's southern coast to New Jersey. Together the systems represent a $500 million investment funded through private equity alongside industry partners, according to trade press coverage of the announcement including Mobile Europe and Data Center Dynamics.
MDM co-founder Jim McMahon framed the rationale around demand growth rather than any single customer: "Demand for transatlantic connectivity is forecast to increase significantly over the next five years." Both systems are still in permitting and marine-survey procurement, with Narwhal 1 targeting a third-quarter 2029 ready-for-service date and Narwhal 2 following in 2030.
A Hub Built for More Than Ireland Alone
Neither cable exists in isolation. MDM's announcement ties Narwhal 1 and Narwhal 2 into a wider network already under development from Irish landing stations: the PISCES system connecting Ireland to Spain, France and Portugal, a planned Galway-to-Norway route, and multiple existing Ireland-to-UK links. The combined effect, per the SubTel Forum and Data Center Dynamics coverage, is to position Ireland as a crossing point between Europe, the UK and North America, not solely as a destination for the traffic the new cables carry.
That distinction matters for reading what this investment actually signals. A new transatlantic cable landing in Ireland is not the same claim as new transatlantic capacity for Irish-sited compute; the cables can carry pass-through EU-to-US traffic that never touches a rack physically located in Ireland at all.
The Power Story Landing at the Same Address
Servola reported on August 12, 2026 that EirGrid will not grant new data-centre grid connection applications in the greater Dublin area until 2028, a freeze drawn directly from EirGrid's own February 2026 resource adequacy assessment, which shows demand outstripping supply at peak through 2026, 2027 and 2028 under both its base and secure planning scenarios. Data centres already draw 23 percent of Ireland's metered national electricity, up from 22 percent a year earlier, and EirGrid's own planning points toward that share climbing into the low 30s by the early 2030s.
Ireland's utility regulator, the CRU, has reopened the connection process on stricter terms: any new data-centre scheme over 10MVA must now fund and site its own generation matching 100 percent of its grid connection in an unconstrained location, and cover 80 percent of annual demand from new Irish renewables within six years. That is the regulatory reality any new Irish-sited compute load will meet, cable capacity or not.
Bandwidth Arriving Ahead of the Power to Use It
Line up the two timelines and the mismatch is exact: Narwhal 1's third-quarter 2029 ready-for-service date lands a year after Dublin's connection freeze is due to lift, and Narwhal 2's 2030 date two years after. Nothing in either EirGrid's assessment or MDM's announcement guarantees the freeze actually ends on schedule, or that new supply arrives fast enough to serve fresh Dublin-area data-centre demand the moment it does.
For an owner or operator reading cable announcements as a proxy for future Irish data-centre capacity, that is the wrong signal to trust on its own. The digital pipe and the physical power to fill it are being built on two different clocks, run by two different institutions answering to two different sets of constraints, and MDM's cables will most likely earn their return from EU-UK-US transit traffic long before Ireland's own grid freeze has any chance of clearing.
Read next: PJM Opens a 10-Project Fast Lane Inside a 220GW Queue | Dublin's Data Centre Grid Is Closed Until 2028
