A profile of New Jersey-based subsea cable company SubCom, which sources say the US military uses exclusively for its undersea internet and surveillance cables
https://www.reuters.com/... [image] Twitter: @reuters : Until a US crackdown on Chinese tech companies five years ago, SubCom laid cables for telecom and tech companies worldwide, including big state-owned China carriers. Not anymore https://www.reuters.com/... [image]
Context & Ripple Effects
SubCom's arc tracks the US-China tech split almost exactly: the New Jersey cable builder once laid lines for Chinese state-owned carriers worldwide, until the US crackdown on Chinese tech five years ago ended that business. Washington then went further than just cutting SubCom off from China — sources say it helped SubCom win its $600M Asia-Europe cable bid through incentives and investor pressure, driven by spying concerns.
Today's profile adds the other half of the picture: sources say the US military now uses SubCom exclusively for its undersea internet and surveillance cables. That makes SubCom a de facto strategic asset, and it lands amid a broader fight over who owns the ocean floor — US officials have already warned Google and Meta about Chinese-owned repair ships tampering with cables, and the FCC is preparing a ban on Chinese tech in US-connected submarine cables.
First-order effects
- SubCom's customer base has inverted: a company that once served Chinese state carriers now depends on the US military as an exclusive client and on US-aligned commercial projects Washington actively steers its way.
- Chinese state telecoms, cut off from SubCom, are left building their own routes — their planned $500M Asia-Middle East-Europe fiber network is the direct substitute for the US-laid capacity they lost.
Second-order effects
- With US Big Tech now holding over 70% of used subsea-cable capacity, up from under 10% a decade ago, routing decisions for the world's internet increasingly concentrate among US-aligned buyers who share Washington's supplier preferences.
- Rival cable builders and Chinese-backed projects face a hardening regulatory wall: the FCC's proposed ban converts what was informal pressure on SubCom's bids into a formal market-access rule for anyone touching US-connected cables.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the global submarine cable network splits into two US-aligned and China-aligned systems, each with its own builders, repair fleets, and landing rules — with governments treating cable manufacturers as defense-industrial assets rather than commercial vendors.
- The SubCom playbook — state incentives and investor pressure to win infrastructure bids — becomes a template for how industrial policy is applied to physical internet infrastructure, inviting reciprocal state steering by China.
The trend: The world's subsea cable layer is bifurcating along US-China lines, with governments converting cable builders like SubCom into instruments of national security policy.