Google and Facebook remove Hong Kong as a destination for the proposed Pacific Light Cable Network undersea cable project, refile keeping Taiwan and Philippines
- Underseas internet project refiled for Taiwan and Philippines — Companies re-apply without Pacific Light Data Communication Tweets: @trevorcroker and @krislc Tweets: Trevor Croker / @trevorcroker : Team Telecom strikes again. Interestingly, US regulatory action against submarine landings has focused on projects involving cloud providers - even though the majority of cable financing comes from telco consortiums https://twitter.com/... Kris Cheng / @krislc : Google and Facebook Inc. dropped plans for an undersea cable between the U.S. and Hong Kong after the Trump administration said Beijing might use the link to collect information on Americans. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Pacific Light Cable Network began in 2016 as a Google-Facebook partnership to link Los Angeles and Hong Kong at 120 terabits per second, but by August 2019 US officials were reportedly trying to block the project on national security grounds. In February 2020 the two companies asked the FCC to activate only the segments excluding Hong Kong and China, and in April the regulator granted Google the Taiwan leg while explicitly blocking the Hong Kong landing.
Today's refile makes that de facto outcome official: Hong Kong is gone from the destination list entirely, Pacific Light Data Communication — Dr. Peng's affiliate and the original Hong Kong backer — has been dropped from the application, and Taiwan and the Philippines carry the project forward.
First-order effects
- Pacific Light Data Communication loses its role in the consortium it anchored, and the Hong Kong landing — the cable's original endpoint — is formally abandoned rather than merely pending approval.
- Google and Facebook salvage their sunk investment by rerouting the business case onto the Taiwan and Philippines legs, which the FCC had already signaled it would accept when it granted the Taiwan segment in April.
Second-order effects
- As Trevor Croker's commentary notes, US regulatory action on submarine landings has concentrated on cloud-provider-backed projects even though telco consortiums supply most cable financing — putting every future hyperscaler cable application through Team Telecom review regardless of who funds it.
- Rival trans-Pacific projects now face a routing decision: design around Hong Kong from day one, or risk the same mid-construction amputation the PLCN suffered between its 2016 announcement and today's refile.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, undersea cable topology becomes an instrument of US-China tech decoupling: landing-point approvals function as chokepoints that decide which cities sit on which networks, pushing regional traffic hubs toward Taipei and Manila.
- The precedent also raises the cost of Chinese participation in international cable consortia, since a single flagged partner can now invalidate an entire landing — a structural shift from open consortium building toward politically screened infrastructure.
The trend: US national-security review of submarine cable landings is redrawing trans-Pacific network geography, with Hong Kong losing its hub status to Taiwan and Southeast Asian alternatives.