Horizontal Directional Drilling to Power the Nordic AI Superhighway

As part of increasing capacity on the Danish network to meet the growing traffic demand created by expanding AI workloads, horizontal directional drilling (HDD) will be used to bring subsea cables ashore. Arelion has announced the improvements and developments at its Nørre Nebel cable landing station.

Nørre Nebel Facility Updates

The updates at the Nørre Nebel facility will support additional cable landings and long-term network scalability. The facility is fully operational, and the fronthaul, backhaul and subsea HDDs for landing numerous different subsea cables are now in place and project-ready.

Route Infrastructure

The global internet carrier is leveraging its duct network on the northern route from Nørre Nebel to Copenhagen via a unique submarine cable system running from Aarhus to Copenhagen.

On the southern route, the lines from Esbjerg to Kolding and Copenhagen increase the resilience of the system and provide route diversity; Kolding serves as an important junction for routes south to Germany and east to Copenhagen.

Strategic Investments

These investments are part of the company’s ongoing strategy of connecting many new data-centre projects in the region to Arelion’s network. They include the recently completed new duct and cable extensions connecting the atNorth DEN01 Copenhagen data centre to Arelion’s Nordic AI superhighway.

New optical systems supporting wavelength capacity between Amsterdam and Kolding have been added to support more efficient traffic routing and provide alternative bypass options for Hamburg.

The Danish Data-Centre Market

Denmark’s access to renewable energy and its strategic location continue to support the country’s emergence as a regional data-centre hub. The national market is expected to reach USD 2.9 billion by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.44 percent.

These improvements strengthen Denmark’s connections to growing data markets and align with broader European initiatives to improve subsea and terrestrial infrastructure in the North Sea region.

Statement from Arelion

Johan Ottosson, Vice President of Strategy and Product Management at Arelion, said:

“These upgrades to our Danish network reflect our broader commitment to strengthening digital infrastructure across the Nordics, enabling AI applications for enterprise and wholesale customers with low-latency, fully diverse connectivity and predictable performance. Our continued investment guarantees the capacity needed to keep pace with the growing demand for accelerating AI-driven services and provides a scalable, secure foundation for both training workloads and latency-sensitive inference use cases.”

Arelion operates one of the world’s most connected IP backbones and serves more than 2,900 customers in around 130 countries.