The Submarine Cable Wars: How the Map of the Internet Is Being Redrawn

On 17 November 2024, at roughly 9 p.m. local time in Swedish waters, the Chinese-flagged bulk carrier Yi Peng 3 dropped its anchor and kept sailing. The BCS East-West Interlink between Sweden and Lithuania severed within the hour. Twelve hours later, the C-Lion1 cable between Finland and Germany parted in the same way. Two NATO member-state arteries, gone in a single night, by a single vessel that had departed the Russian port of Ust-Luga two days earlier. The thesis is not that the internet is fragile. It is that the internet is being rebuilt, deliberately, around a small number of corporate owners and a smaller number of politically acceptable routes, and that the seabed has become the surface on which the next decade of great-power competition will actually be fought. Around 570 active submarine cable systems, totalling roughly 1.4 to 1.5 million kilometres, carry approximately 99 percent of intercontinental data and somewhere on the order of ten trillion dollars a day in financial-transaction value. The map of that infrastructure is changing faster, and more politically, than at any point since the British-laid telegraph network of the 1870s.

The Hyperscaler Takeover. The first redrawing is ownership. For most of the fiber era, intercontinental cables were built by consortia of national telcos splitting the bill. That model is dead. Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft now finance the majority of new long-haul capacity, and a growing share outright. TeleGeography projects roughly thirteen billion dollars of new subsea systems will land between 2025 and 2027, nearly double the 2022 to 2024 figure. Meta’s Project Waterworth, announced 14 February 2025 as a multi-billion-dollar, multi-year build, is engineered as a 24-fiber-pair system stretching more than 50,000 kilometres across five continents, on its own the longest cable ever attempted. Meta also completed the core of 2Africa in November 2025, 45,000 kilometres connecting 33 countries and roughly three billion people, with the Pearls Gulf extension to follow in 2026. Google’s Equiano, ready for service March 2023, delivers 144 Tbps from Portugal to Cape Town on twelve fiber pairs, around twenty times the prior regional capacity. Google’s Firmina, 14,517 kilometres from the US East Coast to Las Toninas, Argentina, runs at 240 Tbps on sixteen fiber pairs. Amazon entered the lead-investor club in 2025 with Fastnet, a wholly AWS-owned cable from Maryland to County Cork due in 2028. The telcos are increasingly tenants on hyperscaler glass, not owners of it.

The Chinese Exclusion. The second redrawing is geopolitical. HMN Technologies, the renamed and restructured former Huawei Marine Networks since Hengtong took majority control in 2020, has been pushed out of one Western-aligned consortium after another. The flagship signal was SeaMeWe-6: in 2023, US pressure flipped the 19,000-kilometre Europe-to-Asia award from HMN to New Jersey-based SubCom. HMN’s PEACE cable, built for Hengtong Group, was rerouted and trimmed of its planned US landings under American objection. New US-aligned trans-Pacific routes, Bifrost (ready for service 2 October 2025, 16,556 kilometres Singapore-Indonesia-Philippines-Guam-US West Coast, a Meta-Amazon-Telin-Keppel consortium) and the parallel NCP and Echo systems, were deliberately routed through the Java and Celebes Seas to bypass the South China Sea entirely. That choice adds mileage, demands heavier armouring for shallower water, and lifts capex by hundreds of millions per system. The FCC has signalled an outright ban on Chinese kit in any cable licensed to land in the United States. The map is being drawn around China, not through it.

The Sabotage Window. The third redrawing is kinetic. The Yi Peng 3 incident in November 2024 was not isolated. NATO and the Atlantic Council count at least eleven Baltic cables damaged in the fifteen months between October 2023 and January 2025. Christmas Day 2024 brought the Eagle S, a Russian shadow-fleet tanker, dragging anchor across the Estlink-2 power cable and four telecoms cables between Finland and Estonia. Earlier, on 24 February 2024, three cables, Seacom/TGN-EA, EIG, and AAE-1, were severed almost simultaneously in the Bab-el-Mandeb chokepoint off Yemen, in the operating area of the Rubymar, a cargo ship abandoned and adrift after a Houthi missile strike, with its anchor on the seabed. East Africa to Southeast Asia routing was disrupted for months. The Taiwan Strait has produced its own steady drip: Chinese-registered vessels cut both cables to the Matsu Islands in early 2023, isolating 14,000 residents for six weeks; the Shunxin 39 in January 2025 and the Hong Tai 58 in February 2025 each damaged Taiwan-side cables. Taipei has logged 27 cable disruptions involving Chinese-flagged vessels since 2018. Some of these incidents are clumsy; some are tradecraft; the asymmetry is that you cannot tell the difference in real time, and that is the point.

Baltic Sentry and the Doctrinal Shift. Western response has hardened from advisory to operational. NATO’s Allied Command Operations launched Baltic Sentry on 14 January 2025, directed by Joint Force Command Brunssum and the new NATO Maritime Centre for Security of Critical Underwater Infrastructure at Northwood. The mission package combines frigates, P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, unmanned surface vessels and seabed-monitoring AI feeds. NATO officials publicly claim no further suspicious cable incidents have occurred in the Baltic since deployment. Cable defence is now stitched into AUKUS Pillar Two and into the EU’s own action plan; cable wartime contingency is doctrine, not staff-college thought-experiment. The supporting industrial base is the wobbly leg. The global cable-ship fleet runs to roughly 80 hulls, average age 25 years, with 47 percent of vessels projected to age out by 2040. The SubOptic Association puts the renewal bill at three billion dollars over fifteen years against forecast 48 percent growth in cable kilometres and 36 percent growth in annual repairs. Five operators, Global Marine, Orange Marine, SubCom, Alcatel Submarine Networks and Optic Marine, control more than half the fleet. China’s Shanghai Salvage and an aggressive HMN fleet build-out, meanwhile, are creating an entirely Chinese-controlled repair capability for the cables Beijing is willing to fix.

The Capex of a Splintering Internet. Numbers concentrate the picture. Meta is putting multi-billion-dollar tickets into single cable systems. AWS has now committed wholly owned cable capex. Microsoft signed two cable equity deals with Hibernia and Aqua Comms in May 2025 to lash Ireland and the UK directly to its North American footprint. Wavelength contracts on hyperscaler routes routinely clear into ten-figure totals. The non-coincidence is that the same four buyers control the global AI training and inference footprint; deglobalised cables and deglobalised compute are the same project. Egypt’s monopoly over Red Sea cable transit, which the Centre for Strategic and International Studies has mapped in detail, is becoming a single point of geopolitical pricing power: roughly 17 percent of global internet traffic passes through Egyptian landings. The same chokepoint logic applies to the Strait of Malacca, the Luzon Strait and the Cornwall-Brest corridor into Europe.

The Verdict. The physical internet is being deglobalised in plain sight. Ownership is consolidating into four American hyperscalers; the residual telco model is dwindling to lit-fiber tenancy. Routing is being drawn around Chinese landings, Chinese vendors and the South China Sea, with the cost differential paid in armour and kilometres. The seabed has been re-categorised, by NATO and by AUKUS, as protected critical infrastructure subject to military deterrence patrol. The cable-repair industrial base, meanwhile, is one bad decade from a capacity crisis that Beijing is positioning to backfill. Data sovereignty in 2026 is determined not in cloud-region maps or data-localisation statutes but at the bottom of the ocean, by who owns the glass, who lands the cable, and whose navy is willing to escort the repair ship. The map of the internet has always been a political artefact. It is now an openly contested one.

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