Keppel secures deal for final Bifrost cable pair; total contracts value hits US$1.3 billion

[SINGAPORE] Asset manager Keppel on Monday (Jul 13) said it has inked an indefeasible right of use agreement with a global hyperscaler for the fifth fibre pair on the Bifrost Cable System, via the group’s connectivity division.

This is the final fibre pair in the company’s Bifrost portfolio committed. It brings the total contract value of the five pairs to about US$1.3 billion.

This includes stable recurring income from cable operations and maintenance over 25 years.

The company said that the Bifrost project is expected to generate an internal rate of return of about 30 per cent for Keppel and its private fund investors.

All five fibre pairs have been committed to a set of customers from major telecommunications operators, hyperscalers and global technology companies, Keppel added.

Bifrost is the first subsea cable system in the world linking Singapore directly to the west coast of the USA via Indonesia, through the Java Sea and Celebes Sea.

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It spans over 20,000 km and supports artificial intelligence, as well as cloud-native workloads, while providing over 240 terabytes per second of additional trans-pacific capacity.

Manjot Singh Mann, CEO of connectivity at Keppel, said: “We are pursuing and evaluating two new cable systems, one from Singapore to the Middle East with branches across South Asia and the other from Singapore to Japan through the South China Sea with branches across Asean.”

Keppel shares were trading 1.2 per cent or S$0.14 up at S$11.62 after the news at 1.12 pm on Monday.