SoftBank, Facebook, Amazon, and others partner to lay 60Tbps Jupiter undersea cable, to open in 2020, from Los Angeles to Japan and the Philippines
NTT Com to Construct Optical Submarine Cable Connecting … Robert Hackett / Fortune : SoftBank Teams With Facebook and Amazon on Undersea Internet Cable
Context & Ripple Effects
Jupiter repeats a route Google's consortium already lit: the 60Tbps FASTER cable began service between the US West Coast and Japan just last year, so SoftBank is buying into proven demand on the busiest Pacific lane. What changed is who pays — a social network and a retailer are now named partners alongside a carrier, following Facebook's 160Tbps Marea crossing of the Atlantic completed weeks earlier and its LA-to-Hong Kong PLCN project announced a year ago.
NTT Com holds the construction contract, keeping a traditional telecom operator at the center of a project whose funders increasingly consume bandwidth rather than sell it.
First-order effects
- SoftBank gains dedicated 60Tbps trans-Pacific capacity for its own network when Jupiter opens in 2020, while Facebook and Amazon lock in private bandwidth instead of leasing transit from carriers.
- NTT Com converts the consortium's capex into a flagship construction win on the US–Japan–Philippines route.
Second-order effects
- Carriers that sell trans-Pacific transit face shrinking wholesale demand as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and now Amazon each self-provision their own crossings, pressuring the price of leased capacity.
- Rival hyperscalers must match the move route by route — Google and Microsoft have already answered in the Pacific and Atlantic respectively, making per-route capacity an arms race among content companies.
Third-order effects
- If every major cloud and content company ends up owning its submarine routes, the industry structure inverts: telcos become builders-for-hire like NTT Com while bandwidth ownership concentrates in a handful of American platforms.
- Consortium membership becomes a bargaining chip over landing rights and routing — the Philippines leg here anticipates the Southeast Asian expansion Google and Facebook pursued four years later.
The trend: Trans-Pacific subsea capacity is shifting from carrier-led consortia to hyperscaler-funded private infrastructure, with each new cable doubling down on the US–Asia corridor.