Subsea internet arteries are being reimagined for an AI era

The undersea network of cables is undergoing a dramatic transformation, evolving from simple connectivity links to strategic, high-capacity infrastructure tailored for AI workloads, reshaping ownership, geopolitics, and resilience strategies to meet surging digital demands.

The undersea arteries of the internet are being reimagined as strategic, high‑capacity infrastructure tailored for an AI‑driven world, shifting priorities from simple connectivity to resilience, control and cloud integration. Industry roadmaps that once treated submarine cable upgrades as incremental now favour large‑scale architectural redesign: higher fibre‑pair counts, space‑division multiplexing (SDM), advanced coherent optics and lower‑loss repeaters to support 400 Tbps‑class links purpose‑built for hyperscale AI workloads. According to the original report, more than 600 submarine systems were catalogued by 2024 (532 operational and 77 planned), underscoring both the scale of present capacity and the rapid pace of deployment required to meet surging demand. ^[1]

Hyperscale cloud providers are no longer passive customers of legacy carriers; they are co‑designers, co‑owners and, in some cases, sole owners of undersea systems to secure predictable capacity, low latency and routing control for AI training and global cloud services. Google, Microsoft, Meta and AWS have all accelerated investments: Google’s Pacific Connect expansion and new Proa and Taihei cables aim to strengthen U.S.–Japan and Pacific links; Microsoft and Meta continue to co‑own and launch high‑capacity projects; and AWS has announced Fastnet, a transatlantic system designed for over 320 Tbps to bolster resilience and capacity. The company announcements and project plans demonstrate a strategic shift in how cloud platforms perceive transport, integral to their global network stacks rather than an external utility. ^[1][3][5][7]

This hyperscaler push is already reshaping route planning and geopolitical exposure. Projects routed near strategic military hubs and allied bases reveal how defence and commercial priorities converge. For example, new high‑capacity cables are being routed close to Australia’s AUKUS base at HMAS Stirling to strengthen digital resilience and support military communications and AI development in the Indo‑Pacific. Such alignment illustrates that subsea cables are becoming dual‑use assets with implications for national security and alliance interoperability. ^[2][6]

Resilience‑by‑design is replacing a “best‑effort” reliability mindset. Operators now assume outages will occur and engineer systems with diversified routing to avoid choke points, deeper burial and enhanced armouring near shorelines, carrier‑neutral landing stations for rapid rerouting, and regional branching to support localised AI/edge clusters. Industry data shows wet‑plant equipment dominated the market by component in 2024, and auxiliary and marine services are forecast to grow strongly, reflecting both higher upfront build complexity and ongoing maintenance needs for a much more active asset class. ^[1]

Cloud‑centric routing and edge adjacency are changing where cables land and how landing sites are regulated. New projects prioritise proximity to data centres and edge compute locations from the outset, and include advanced optical switching and branching units that enable dynamic traffic steering and tighter integration with software‑defined WAN orchestration. Verizon and AWS’s expanded fibre partnership on low‑latency long‑haul routes offers a terrestrial analogue: telecoms and cloud providers are collaborating to create the end‑to‑end fabric demanded by generative AI and latency‑sensitive applications. ^[1][4][7]

Economic forecasts and market share data reinforce the commercial drivers behind the technical shifts. The global submarine optical fibre cable market is projected to grow from about USD 5 billion in 2025 to nearly USD 9 billion by 2030, with SDM multi‑core fibres and above‑60 Tbps designs showing the fastest compound annual growth rates. Telecom operators still held the largest client share in 2024, but hyperscalers are the fastest‑growing cohort, reshaping investment patterns and ownership models across the industry. North America led revenues in 2024 while the Asia‑Pacific region is poised for the most rapid expansion through 2030. ^[1]

Permitting, environmental exposure and geopolitics are emerging as decisive constraints on deployment speed and design choices. Governments increasingly treat subsea cables as strategic infrastructure, tightening control over landing rights and ownership structures and demanding greater physical and logical segmentation. Regulatory clarity and protected landing zones can confer a durable competitive advantage, a point illustrated by Bermuda’s Submarine Communications Cable Act, which has created a transparent permitting framework and attracted new systems by aligning investor timelines with local protection measures. Industry participants increasingly choose routes and technologies that can be approved, defended and maintained over decades rather than those that simply minimise upfront cost. ^[1]

The practical consequences for corporate site‑selectors, C‑suite executives and policymakers are immediate. Investors and site‑selectors must evaluate landing sites for regulatory transparency, climate exposure and operational flexibility. Executives must align infrastructure strategy with partner ecosystems to secure latency, capacity and compliance advantages. Policymakers who design agile, predictable frameworks for landing rights and environmental permitting will influence whether their jurisdictions become preferred nodes or are bypassed as hyperscalers seek route diversity and geopolitical safety. ^[1]

Examples of current projects illustrate the broader trends: Google’s investment in Pacific connectivity and its protracted Pacific Connect initiative aim to create redundant, resilient paths between the U.S., Japan and Pacific territories; AWS’s Fastnet seeks to provide an alternative transatlantic corridor with advanced switching and armouring to avoid traditional chokepoints; and multilateral routing near AUKUS facilities demonstrates the intersection of commercial resilience and strategic policy. Taken together, these programmes exemplify how throughput, route diversity and regulatory strategy are being unified around the needs of an AI‑centric digital economy. ^[3][7][2][6]

As capacity goals climb toward 400‑Tbps class designs and beyond, the subsea‑cable sector is being recast as a foundational layer of global digital infrastructure, where technical innovation, ownership models and regulatory regimes converge. The industry’s next decade will be defined as much by where cables are permitted, protected and integrated with cloud and edge ecosystems as by raw terabit counts. Jurisdictions and operators that anticipate AI‑driven demand, embed resilience in design and offer predictable, strategic regulatory frameworks are likely to capture disproportionate value as the global network evolves. ^[1]

📌 Reference Map:

##Reference Map:

• ^[1] (Techblog / lead article) – Paragraph 1, Paragraph 2, Paragraph 4, Paragraph 6, Paragraph 7, Paragraph 8, Paragraph 9, Paragraph 10
• ^[2] (Reuters) – Paragraph 3, Paragraph 9
• ^[3] (Google Cloud blog) – Paragraph 2, Paragraph 9
• ^[4] (Reuters) – Paragraph 5
• ^[5] (Wikipedia / MAREA) – Paragraph 2
• ^[6] (Reuters) – Paragraph 3, Paragraph 9
• ^[7] (ITPro) – Paragraph 2, Paragraph 5, Paragraph 9

Source: Fuse Wire Services