Keep pulling the thread on Samanth Subramanian.
The Taiwanese government is concerned that China could cut all 15 of its international internet cables as an act of war.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE are financing competing data corridors through Syria, Iraq, and East Africa to create alternative routes that bypass the Strait of Hormuz.
The AI boom, driven by models like Claude and ChatGPT, has created a significant new data burden on the subsea cable industry due to massive data flows for training and inference.
Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft were funding or owning two out of every three new subsea cables being laid.
The Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz are critical chokepoints where a malicious actor could significantly disrupt global internet connectivity by cutting the numerous cables concentrated there.
The dominance of Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft in funding new subsea cables is a strategic weakness for the internet, as it concentrates control over which regions receive connectivity.
The "To Africa" subsea cable is funded and owned almost entirely by Meta, giving the company significant influence over which African nations receive new internet connectivity.
African governments like Cote d'Ivoire risk being bypassed for new subsea cable landings if they demand data sovereignty rules similar to those in Europe from tech companies like Meta.
U.S. sanctions against Chinese tech companies like Huawei and its spinoff HMN create geopolitical risk for any country or entity that engages them for subsea cable projects.
At least one completed subsea cable project involving both Western and Chinese companies remains inactive because the U.S. government has blocked its operation.
No new direct subsea cables have been laid between China and the U.S. for several years, despite continuously growing data traffic between the two countries.
There are concerns within the subsea cable industry that geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China could lead to a "bifurcation of the internet" into separate, competing infrastructure systems.