A look at the global network of subsea internet cables, dominated by companies from France, the US, and Japan, as China circumvents US curbs to build its own
Nearly 1.4mn kilometres of metal-encased fibre criss-crosses the world's oceans, speeding internet traffic seamlessly around the globe.
Context & Ripple Effects
This FT mapping of the world's roughly 1.4 million kilometres of subsea fibre landed months after Reuters reported [[a:838793|Chinese state-owned telecoms planning a $500M undersea network linking Asia, the Middle East, and Europe]] — the clearest early sign that Beijing was building around, not through, the US-allied system. The network it maps is dominated by French, American, and Japanese operators, a structure built on consortium models like the 60Tbps Jupiter cable backed by SoftBank, Facebook, and Amazon.
What followed sharpened the stakes: Bloomberg later documented US Big Tech growing to over 70% of used subsea-cable capacity from under 10% a decade earlier (the US-China tussle over subsea cables), and the FCC moved toward barring companies using certain Chinese tech from building cables that touch the US (the proposed FCC landing ban). The article matters because it shows the physical layer of the internet consolidating just as geopolitical pressure starts splitting who can connect to whom.
First-order effects
- Chinese state-owned telecoms are locked out of the dominant US-France-Japan consortium system and are financing their own Asia-Middle East-Europe routes instead, making them both customer and competitor to the incumbent suppliers.
Second-order effects
- US Big Tech's majority share of used cable capacity means hyperscalers now set route economics, forcing traditional telecom carriers into secondary roles as landlords of landing stations rather than owners of traffic.
- Cable manufacturers and repair fleets face pressure to choose between US-aligned and China-aligned project pipelines, since the FCC's proposed ban penalizes any Chinese equipment in cables landing on US shores.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the internet's physical substrate bifurcates into parallel US-led and Chinese-led systems — a structural split where AI-driven investment surges like the projected doubling of subsea capex get allocated by geopolitics rather than pure traffic demand, and single points of failure like the West African canyon breaks become strategic vulnerabilities for whichever bloc owns the repair capability.
The trend: Subsea infrastructure is shifting from a shared commercial commons dominated by Western consortia toward two geopolitically separated networks, with export controls and landing bans accelerating the split.