The Cables Under the Ocean: Who Owns the Internet's Spine

The builders

Owning a cable and building one are different trades. The building trade is an oligopoly of three — and each of the three now answers to a different kind of master.

Alcatel Submarine Networks is the French one: founded in the age of the telegraph (its lineage runs to 1858), headquartered at Les Ulis on the Paris-Saclay plateau, ~2,000 employees, seven cable ships operated with Louis-Dreyfus Armateurs. In January 2025, the French state bought it: the Agence des participations de l'État took 80% — the transaction finalized December 31, 2024, announced complete January 6, 2025 — at a €350 million enterprise value, with Nokia keeping 20%. Nokia had itself acquired ASN through Alcatel-Lucent in 2016. The economics minister signed the contract in Calais and called it digital sovereignty, in so many words. He was not wrong: Paris now owns the company that lays roughly a third of the world's subsea cable. Its president and CEO: Alain Biston.

SubCom is the American one: Eatontown, New Jersey; 1,400-plus staff; eight cable ships; 610,000-plus kilometres deployed. In November 2018, Cerberus — the private-equity fund — bought it from TE Connectivity for $325 million in cash. Read that again: the company that built Google's transatlantic Dunant system, the company that lays the glass for the American internet's foreign policy, is a portfolio asset. Its CEO: David Coughlan.

NEC is the Japanese one — the quiet third of the oligopoly, dominant in Asia-Pacific, industrial rather than financial in ownership. Three builders, three models: a state, a fund, an industrial group. Between them, roughly two-thirds of everything ever laid.

The symmetry is the story. No one planned it, but the three companies that can physically build the internet's spine are now owned by a government, a buyout fund, and a keiretsu-adjacent giant. The market did not consolidate the builders. Power did.

The landing stations

The sea is not the chokepoint. The beach is.

Cables must come ashore, and they come ashore at a small number of addresses. At Mumbai's Versova beach, thirteen of India's eighteen intercontinental cables land inside a six-kilometre stretch of sand. Six kilometres — the length of a morning run — carrying the subcontinent's connection to the world.

The pattern repeats everywhere the map matters: the Red Sea corridor and Egypt's Mediterranean landings, where Asia–Europe traffic funnels between two seas; Marseille, Europe's great southern door; Singapore, the strait's switchboard; Virginia Beach, where the transatlantic cables of Google and Meta touch American soil. TeleGeography counts 1,893 landing stations, but the traffic does not spread evenly across them — it piles onto a handful of beaches, in a handful of jurisdictions, under a handful of governments.

A landing station is a building with a fence. It can be guarded, taxed, tapped, or closed. The ocean is international waters. The beach is not.

The Red Sea cut

In February 2024, the world got a live demonstration. Four cables — AAE-1, EIG, Seacom and TGN Atlantic — were severed in the Red Sea. Roughly a quarter of Asia–Europe traffic was affected, per HGC Global Communications; more than 100 million people across West and North Africa felt the degradation. The cause was almost insultingly mundane: the dragging anchor of the Rubymar, a vessel already stricken in the region's wider conflict.

No sabotage unit. No cyberweapon. An anchor.

The repair took months, in waters where commercial shipping was already rerouting around conflict. The lesson the industry drew was not about anchors — it was about concentration: when a quarter of two continents' traffic runs through one strait, the strait is the network, and the network's backup plan is a ship with a grapnel.

The future map

The next decade's cables are already announced, and they tell you where power is going: around Africa, and into private hands.

2Africa reached its core completion on November 20, 2025: 45,000-plus kilometres, 33-plus countries, 180 Tbps of design capacity, eight partners — Meta, China Mobile International, Orange, Vodafone Group, Telecom Egypt, Bayobab, center3 and WIOCC — on an open-access model. Read the partner list twice: the cable ringing Africa is jointly owned by an American hyperscaler, a Chinese state carrier, European incumbents and African wholesalers. It is the most geopolitically crowded consortium ever laid — and its open-access terms mean any operator can buy capacity, which is the closest the industry gets to neutrality.

Waterworth is the opposite bet: one owner, one system, 50,000 kilometres. The consortium era built the internet's spine by committee. The next era is being built the way railroads were — by the companies that need the freight.

Between them, the map is being redrawn: state-owned builders, private-equity builders, hyperscaler owners, and landing stations in a dozen jurisdictions that have all — every one of them — understood what they are sitting on.