Amazon Web Services has a new plan for its transatlantic cable in Ocean City: skip the cable landing station altogether.
The move comes as a proposed cable landing station, or CLS, from developer Globalinx has been frozen by a Worcester County moratorium on data centers and CLS projects. Amazon instead proposes to build a small, unmanned building at the Ocean City Municipal Airport.
“Amazon has no intention to build a CLS or a data center in Worcester County,” a company spokesperson told OC Today-Dispatch via email.
Amazon says the structure – known as a power-feed equipment, or PFE, facility – would be no larger than 700 square feet. It would supply electricity to the cable and pass its optical signal farther inland.
“If the PFE building is approved, the additional equipment that would otherwise have been housed in a nearby cable landing station will be placed in an existing AWS facility in the greater Washington region,” the spokesperson said. Amazon Web Services is the corporation’s cloud-computing division.