SWITCHED ON
The Cables That Run the Internet
More than 400 cables lie on the seabed carrying almost all the world's data. In 2026 they are also the thing everyone suddenly wants to own, protect, or quietly cut.
By Neal Lloyd · House of Kong · November 2026Last time, in Sucking Carbon Out of the Sky, we watched machines fight the atmosphere one tonne at a time. Today we go to the bottom of the ocean, where thinner machines than you'd expect are doing a much bigger job: carrying essentially everything you do online, and getting harder to protect every year.
The cloud is a cable, mostly
Satellites get the headlines, but more than 99 percent of intercontinental data still travels through fibre-optic cables lying on the seabed, roughly as thick as a garden hose. There are more than 400 of these systems in service or under construction worldwide. A video call from Sydney to London, a bank transfer, a cloud backup: almost all of it is physically a pulse of light running through glass on the ocean floor, often laid and maintained by a surprisingly small number of specialised companies and ships. This series has touched the submarine cable story before. What has changed since is the pressure on the system, from three directions at once: demand, maintenance, and sabotage.
AI traffic breaks the old math
Most subsea cables have historically been built by consortiums: a group of telecoms and governments sharing the cost and the fibre pairs. That model was sized for internet traffic growth as it looked a few years ago. AI workloads have broken that assumption, because training and inference traffic between data centres is growing faster than consortium planning cycles can absorb, and nobody wants to be stuck sharing capacity when a rival has locked in their own.
So the hyperscalers are increasingly building alone. Amazon's AWS Fastnet will be its first wholly owned transatlantic cable, linking Maryland to County Cork, Ireland, due in 2028 and designed for more than 320 terabits per second across sixteen fibre pairs. Microsoft has filed for three Ireland–Wales systems under the names Tuskar, SOBR1 and SOBR2. Google already solely funds several cables, including Dunant, Equiano and Nuvem, alongside its first fully private system, Curie, linking California and Chile. Meta's Project Waterworth, announced in February 2025, is a solo undertaking of more than 50,000 kilometres across five continents, described as the longest subsea cable project ever attempted. Owning the whole system means controlling your own upgrades and never competing for scarce fibre pairs with a consortium partner.
An ageing fleet nobody is replacing fast enough
Here is the part that gets far less attention than the glamorous new builds. Roughly 60 specialised ships worldwide lay or maintain the entire global cable network, and fewer than 20 of those work on repairs alone. The fleet is old: only around 8 of the 60 are under 18 years, 19 are over 30, and the oldest was built in 1978. No new cable ship was delivered anywhere between 2004 and 2010. About two-thirds of the maintenance fleet is expected to reach retirement age by 2040.
When a repair ship is far from the fault or working in a dangerous area, the delay compounds fast. After a cable repair ship sank in the Red Sea in 2024, fixes in that corridor stalled for months. A one-ocean industry with a handful of ageing ships has very little slack for a bad year.
The internet's backbone is not software. It is a few dozen ships old enough to retire, racing a demand curve that keeps getting steeper.
Switched On · S3 EP11When an accident stops looking accidental
Cables have always been damaged by trawlers and anchors. What is new is how often damage now gets treated as deliberate. In the Baltic Sea, Finland has seized a ship suspected of dragging its anchor across telecommunications cables, part of a pattern of incidents European officials increasingly link to Russia. Near Taiwan, several cables are cut most years in episodes Taipei has described as suspected sabotage by vessels connected to China, most recently prompting renewed accusations through 2026. A NATO official quoted in reporting on the issue argues that subsea cables now sit at a genuine legal grey zone: international law has no clear answer for whether severing one counts as piracy, terrorism, or an act approaching armed attack, which makes deterrence and prosecution difficult either way.
None of this means every cable fault is an attack. The vast majority still are not. But the uncertainty itself is now a strategic tool: a state actor gets the disruption without ever needing to admit anything, because the baseline rate of accidental damage gives genuine deniability. That is a hard environment to defend against with ships, since you cannot armour the entire seabed.
A map most people never see
The visible half of this story is the one everyone actually experiences: a fast, invisible internet that simply works, video calls that connect, websites that load. The invisible half is a global map of fibre, ownership stakes, repair contracts and ageing ships that almost nobody outside the industry ever looks at, and that increasingly sits at the intersection of corporate strategy and state power. The hyperscalers building solo cables are solving their own capacity problem. They are not solving the fleet problem, and a faster private cable is no more protected from an anchor or a grudge than a consortium one.
We leave the ocean floor and head back to the grid, where a quieter transformation is underway: electricity networks are getting software brains, turning millions of batteries, thermostats and electric vehicles into something that behaves like a single, programmable power plant.
See you then.
SOURCES
Make Tech Easier: Only ~60 ships can fix a broken undersea cable · Capacity Media: Why hyperscalers are laying their own subsea cables · Finland seizes Baltic ship suspected of cable sabotage · Taiwan believes China behind undersea cable damage · Capacity Media: Cable ships are not being replaced fast enough
