The Florida peninsula is home to dappled waves, jet skis, vibrant nightlife and tropical beaches dotted with sunbathers. While Florida may not be the first state that comes to mind when you think “tech mecca,” the region has been a primary focus of our North American network expansion over the past few years through new routes and Points-of-Presence (PoPs).
The market’s growth is partially due to space, capacity and power becoming increasingly strained as long-standing tech hubs like Silicon Valley and New York City become oversaturated amid the rise of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) applications and cloud computing. As a result, Florida is emerging as a center of technological innovation and startup creation, necessitating powerful Tier 1 connectivity to enable continued market growth.
A booming tech region
Florida has been dubbed the “Silicon Coast” due to its recent tech boom, with Tampa experiencing a 30 percent growth in tech jobs over the past five years. Neighboring St. Petersburg is also a hotbed of tech investment, with a $20 million innovation center projected to create 1,200 tech jobs in the area. Florida recently ranked fourth in the United States for tech growth, adding 2,715 tech businesses last year and outpacing established hubs, including California and Texas.
Florida’s Space Coast, home to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, is also experiencing exponential job growth in aerospace manufacturing and engineering, projected to reach 112% growth by 2033. Amid this tech boom, the Florida peninsula’s market drivers include the need for high-capacity bandwidth to serve the connectivity requirements of enterprise cloud services, AI/ML applications, manufacturing and content delivery.
But that’s not the end of it. Florida is also a key gateway for global connectivity, bringing North America together with Latin America. In 2025-2026, no less than 5 new cable systems (Confluence 1, GD1-/LN-1, TAM-1, TIKAL-AMX3) are due to land in the region, further emphasizing the role of markets like Jacksonville and Boca Raton as digital gateways.
So, how are we at Arelion facilitating the region’s technological progress?
Our Gulf Coast network
Diverse Route Deployments: Our ongoing network investments in the Florida peninsula strive to serve these market drivers and support the region’s booming technology industries. In May 2024, we deployed two new fully diverse routes from Jacksonville and Tallahassee into Atlanta, with an overbuild from Miami up Florida’s west coast into Atlanta. This expansion establishes Tallahassee as a new market for us, enabling us to support subsea traffic flows into Atlanta from the Caribbean, Central America and South America through subsea cables landing in Jacksonville.
The overbuild route also enhances capacity, routing flexibility and meshing from Atlanta to Tallahassee, continuing via Tampa to Miami. With this network expansion, we now have four diverse route options into Jacksonville and six diverse route options into Atlanta. With the overbuild route, Florida is well connected to Atlanta, Northern Virginia and cable landings further up the East Coast, such as Virginia Beach.
Subsea Cable Landings: Earlier this year, we collaborated with Telxius to provide fully diverse, multi-terabit connectivity into Telxius’ landing stations in Boca Raton and Jacksonville, Florida. This fiber network expansion established Arelion PoPs at each Telxius landing station, empowering customers with resilient Tier-1 optical transport and high-speed access to Arelion’s #1 ranked North American network.
Through this network expansion, we also provide Latin American markets with high-capacity gateway access to the North American connectivity ecosystem via subsea landing stations, helping us serve the needs of Internet carriers and content providers in Panama, South America and the Caribbean. In addition, metro connectivity to Edgeconnex’s PoP supports further cloud and AI workloads.
Flexential Collaboration: Our network footprint in Florida now includes a Point-of-Presence at Flexential’s Tampa – North data center campus, supporting business growth in Florida’s regional edge markets through diverse connectivity services. This PoP strengthens the region’s technology ecosystem to support our customers in delivering cloud, media and AI/ML applications amid escalating market demands.
In meeting these demands, this PoP bolsters Flexential’s interconnect capabilities, enabling high-capacity data transfer to serve the networking requirements of AI/ML workloads. Our collaboration with Flexential helps the data center operator support the compute-intensive solutions of South Florida’s flourishing tech industry, enabling continued innovation and business growth.
For the next installment of our North American expansion series, we’ll explore our network footprint in Atlanta amid the region’s data center boom, including key routes, PoPs and market drivers.
Johan Ottosson, VP Strategy & Product Management