Around 90% of all international data traffic travels through submarine cables, making them essential to the global economy but also a critical source of vulnerability in the event of disruption.[1] The most critical stretch of this network has threaded through the Red Sea, crossed Egyptian soil, and descended into the Gulf, the shortest path between Europe and Asia. The vulnerability of these cables is now being stress-tested in real time as the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea are effectively closed to commercial traffic, an unprecedented scenario that increases the risk of anchor damage from congested vessels while exposing a critical shortage of repair ships, meaning any cable failure could take months to fix. This convergence of physical disruption and constrained repair capacity exposes a deeper structural issue, not just where the internet runs, but who controls it. The conflict has the potential not only to disrupt but also to reshape MENA’s role within global digital infrastructure. Rather than hinging on a single point of failure, the region’s risk profile is defined by the concentration of multiple, interdependent corridors, particularly across the Red Sea and the Gulf, that together carry a significant share of Europe-Asia data flows.
For most of the internet’s history, submarine cable infrastructure was owned and operated by consortia of telecommunications companies, state carriers, and private operators sharing both capital costs and commercial returns. In the past decade, that model has been dismantled. Big technology companies such as Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have increased their share of global cable capacity from roughly 10% to more than 70%.[2] Rather than renting capacity from infrastructure providers, the firms are vertically integrating, combining physical infrastructure with their content and cloud services. That may be commercially rational. Strategically, it is a different matter. Critical global infrastructure, once distributed across dozens of national carriers with varying degrees of regulatory oversight, is now concentrated in four corporate hands. When those cables run through active war zones, the question of who is responsible for protecting them, and who bears the cost when they cannot be repaired, has no clear answer.
This insight explores the evolving strategic importance of MENA within global data flows, the reassessment of widely cited infrastructure claims, how geopolitical tensions are acting as catalysts for network diversification and redesign, and the growing influence of private sector actors in redefining resilience. Together, these dynamics suggest a transition from concentrated, risk-prone corridors toward a more distributed and adaptive global internet system.
MENA as a strategic digital corridor
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) occupy a structurally central position in the architecture of global connectivity, where the shortest digital route between Europe and Asia runs through the Mediterranean basin. As tensions escalate in the Gulf, particularly around the Strait of Hormuz, traffic that would normally pass through Gulf routes becomes increasingly dependent on the Red Sea-Egypt pathway. At the center of this system, Egypt functions as a critical land bridge linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), this route carries approximately 17% of global internet traffic and facilitates the vast majority of Europe-Asia data flows.[3]
Extending eastward, the Arabian Peninsula is rapidly shifting from a transit corridor into a digital hub. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are backing this transition with large-scale investments in cloud regions, subsea cable landings, and hyperscale data centers. In Saudi Arabia, projects such as NEOM’s data infrastructure, 1.5 gigawatt AI-powered data center, and new cloud regions launched by Google Cloud and Oracle signal ambitions to localize data storage and processing.[4] Similarly, the UAE has positioned itself as a regional cloud hub, hosting infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, alongside major carrier-neutral data centers in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Together, these investments reflect a clear strategy: moving beyond data transit to capture higher-value digital activity, from cloud services to content delivery and regional data governance.
In this sense, MENA is evolving from a passageway into a platform, one that supports both global traffic flows and regional digital consumption. Yet this dual role introduces a fundamental tension. The same geographic features that make the region indispensable also render it vulnerable. High levels of infrastructure concentration, coupled with exposure to geopolitical instability, create systemic risks that extend far beyond the region itself. MENA is therefore best understood not simply as a chokepoint, but as a critical corridor, one that embodies both fragility and opportunity.
Conflict as a stress test: the Red Sea and Gulf under pressure
The cables that carry the world’s data represent, in balance sheet terms, some of the most undervalued critical assets in the global economy. They are largely invisible, almost entirely uninsured against conflict damage, and governed by legal frameworks written before the era of hybrid warfare. Under normal operating conditions, that invisibility is commercially irrelevant. Under the current conflict conditions in the Gulf, it has become a material risk.
A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz does not automatically sever the cables on the seabed beneath it. The physical infrastructure continues to carry data even as the tankers above it stand off at anchor. But the operational relationship between the two is tighter than it appears. Repairing a severed submarine cable requires a specialized vessel to reach the break, lower equipment to the seabed, retrieve the cable, splice it, and return it, a process requiring the ship to remain stationary for a minimum of 40 days, at a cost of between US$1-3 million per repair, and conditional on access permissions from every coastal state along the route. When the surface is a war zone, that process cannot begin. The capex has been spent. The asset is degraded. There is no remediation timeline.
The maintenance backlog is already building. Repair ships deployed to address damage from late 2025 have been forced to suspend operations, with both the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz now effectively closed to commercial vessels.[5] Against a global fleet of just 63 cable repair ships, with two-to-four positioned in the Middle East, the capacity constraint is severe, and the queue is growing. Each unrepaired cut compresses the total bandwidth available to surviving cables, which must absorb rerouted traffic on top of the existing load.
The incident risk has simultaneously risen. The most frequent cause of cable damage in this corridor is not sabotage but the predictable consequence of maritime disorder: vessels anchoring in unplanned locations, drifting ships dragging across the seabed, and naval activity disturbing the ocean floor. In the February 2024 failure, the stricken Rubymar dragged its anchor and severed three major cable systems, disrupting 25% of Asia-Europe traffic.[6] With over 150 ships now anchored outside the Strait of Hormuz, such incidents are no longer a remote possibility; they are increasingly the expected scenario.
The most visible corporate casualty is Meta’s 2Africa Pearls project. Alcatel Submarine Networks, the French contractor responsible for laying the cable, has issued force majeure notices to its clients, declaring it can no longer safely operate in the Gulf. The cable-laying vessel Ile De Batz is now stranded off the coast of Dammam, Saudi Arabia, unable to complete its mission. A significant portion of the cable sits on the seabed, connected to nothing. Beyond Meta, SEA-ME-WE 6 faces indefinite postponement, and the US$700 million WorldLink Transit Cable Project, whose entire commercial premise rested on the Gulf as a viable alternative corridor, now appears unviable.[7]
The combination of geographic control, repair paralysis, and latent threat of deliberate cutting is sufficient to degrade global routing and compress Europe-Asia capacity for the entire duration of the conflict. For any business with material exposure to cloud services, cross-border data flows, or Gulf-based operations, the relevant question is no longer whether disruption will occur. It is how long it will last, how deep the capacity loss will run, and whether the contractual and operational frameworks currently in place are adequate to manage it.
The rise of big tech as infrastructure owners
The entities now responsible for the cables sitting damaged on the seabed of the Gulf are not national telecommunications ministries or intergovernmental consortia. They are, in the main, a handful of technology companies whose primary business is selling advertising, cloud computing, and consumer software.
In 2010, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon had invested in only one long-distance cable between them. By 2024, they owned all or portions of more than 30.[8] The commercial rationale is straightforward. Leasing capacity from third-party operators is expensive, inflexible, and subject to the priorities of carriers whose interests do not always align with those of hyperscale tenants. Rather than renting capacity from infrastructure providers, the firms are vertically integrating, combining physical infrastructure with their content and cloud services. The result is a system in which the same company that sells cloud storage also owns the cable connecting the data center to its users, the landing station where it comes ashore, and increasingly the spectrum rights governing how the signal travels. Vertical integration of this depth, in any other sector, would attract sustained regulatory attention.
The war has shown that owning the infrastructure also means absorbing the consequences when it comes under direct attack. Drones struck three AWS data centers over a single weekend, two in the UAE and one in Bahrain, forcing AWS to advise customers to consider migrating workloads out of the Middle East entirely, warning that the regional operating environment “remains unpredictable”. The strikes did not merely damage physical assets. They damaged the foundational commercial proposition of Gulf cloud infrastructure that data stored in the region is secure, accessible, and sovereign. For enterprise customers who had migrated critical workloads to Gulf-based cloud infrastructure on precisely that assumption, the attacks represented a rise in the risk calculus on which those decisions rested.
The longer-term corporate response is already being designed around the conflict’s lessons. Meta’s Project Waterworth, a 50,000-km cable connecting the United States, India, South Africa, and Brazil, is explicitly routed to bypass the Middle East.[9] The architecture of global connectivity is being redrawn by capital allocation decisions made by large tech companies. Whether private investment at this scale can substitute for the kind of coordinated international infrastructure policy the moment demands is the central unanswered question of the crisis.
Diversification and the redesign of global routes
A second pathway lies in overland Eurasian corridors, where fiber networks running across Central Asia are being accelerated from a strategic option to an urgent necessity. Several concrete initiatives already exist. Routes developed by Rostelecom carry traffic between Europe and Asia across Russia, while China’s Digital Silk Road, backed by firms including Huawei and China Telecom, has expanded fiber corridors through Kazakhstan toward Western China and Europe. The Trans-Eurasia Information Network connects European and Asian research institutions via terrestrial links through Central Asia. Each of these routes has operated at the margins of global capacity planning. The conflict is pushing them toward the center.
The most significant near-term development is the Trans-Caspian Fiber Optic project, a joint initiative between AzerTelecom of Azerbaijan and Kazakhtelecom, built by HMN Technologies. Manufacturing and factory acceptance testing have been completed for reaching the lowest physically achievable latency across the Caspian. Commercial operations are scheduled for the third quarter of 2026.[10] The timing is significant: the cable will enter service while both the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz remain compromised, positioning it immediately as a viable alternative rather than a contingency. Critically, it offers what neither of those alternatives currently can: a route that bypasses both the Middle East conflict zone and Russian-controlled territory, the latter carrying its own sanctions and dependency risks in a post-Ukraine geopolitical environment. Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prime Minister has confirmed the project is already receiving applications from foreign countries seeking to connect to the line.
The overland corridors are not without constraints. Multiple border crossings, varying regulatory regimes, and the latency penalties of terrestrial routing mean they cannot fully substitute for high-capacity subsea systems on the Europe-Asia trunk. But in a connectivity landscape where the primary submarine routes are simultaneously inaccessible, partial substitution at scale is no longer an abstract planning scenario. It is the operating reality, and the infrastructure investment decisions being made now will determine how much of that capacity exists when it is needed most.
The geopolitics of resilience
The legal architecture governing submarine cables was not designed for the era of hyperscale internet infrastructure, hybrid warfare, or great-power competition over digital corridors. It was designed for telegraph lines. The foundational international treaty protecting submarine cables dates to 1884, a document conceived when the primary concern was a ship’s anchor accidentally severing a copper wire carrying Morse code. More than 140 years later, it remains the baseline from which international law in this domain operates.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), concluded in 1982 and still the primary framework, represents a modest update rather than a structural rethink. UNCLOS Article 113 requires states to enact laws to prevent the destruction of submarine cables but does not impose any affirmative obligation to protect them.[11]
Where cables are sabotaged in international waters, there is currently no effective regime to hold the perpetrator responsible. If cables are willfully damaged, jurisdiction lies with the state under whose flag the offending ship operates. The current international legal framework shows significant deficiencies across three dimensions: jurisdiction, standards for establishing offences, and liability for compensation. The enforcement gap is compounded by a jurisdictional one. As currently interpreted, UNCLOS does not automatically give a coastal state the authority to board and search a foreign vessel suspected of damaging submarine cables in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ). That can only be done with the cooperation of the ship’s flag state, permission that can be very slow to come, if it comes at all, by which time the vessel may be far outside the coastal state’s jurisdiction.[12]
However, UNCLOS Article 79’s clauses 3 and 4 say that “the delineation of the course for the laying of such pipelines (and cables) on the continental shelf is subject to the consent of the coastal State” and “Nothing in this Part affects the right of the coastal State to establish conditions for cables or pipelines entering its territory or territorial sea, or its jurisdiction over cables and pipelines constructed.”[13] In other words, the coastal state with jurisdiction on the continental shelf/EEZ has the right to demand information from ships about the laying of cables and to set conditions for doing so.
In the Baltic Sea, this precise problem emerged repeatedly in 2024 and 2025 as suspected Russian shadow fleet vessels damaged cables and departed before any enforcement action could be taken. NATO’s response was Baltic Sentry, launched in January 2025, deploying frigates, maritime patrol aircraft, and naval drones to monitor critical undersea infrastructure and deter sabotage.[14] The mission represented the most significant coordinated effort to protect submarine cables in the alliance’s history. It has no equivalent in the Middle East, where the cables carrying a far larger share of global traffic had no comparable protection framework, no multilateral monitoring mechanism, and no shared enforcement doctrine.
That asymmetry matters. Baltic Sentry worked because the states bordering the relevant sea shared a security framework, a command structure, and a common adversary. None of those conditions apply in the Gulf. The cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz cross the territorial waters and EEZs of states that are parties to the current conflict, states that are neutral but exposed, and states whose regulatory cooperation cannot be assumed, partly because they are non-signatories to UNCLOS. The suitability of the current international legal regime to address the challenges that states and stakeholders face in relation to submarine cables is the subject of an ongoing study by the International Law Association Committee on Submarine Cables and Pipelines under International Law Comsoc, a timeline that offers little comfort to network operators managing live outages today.[15]
Governments treated submarine cables as a commercial matter; markets treated cable protection as an externality; and the legal frameworks that might have created accountability were never updated to reflect the strategic value of what they were meant to protect. Private capital is now filling the investment gap, building new routes, diversifying away from compromised corridors, and absorbing losses that public frameworks failed to prevent. What private capital cannot supply is the jurisdictional authority, the enforcement capacity, or the multilateral legitimacy that effective cable protection requires. That remains, for the moment, entirely absent, and the conflict in the Gulf has ensured that its absence can no longer be overlooked.
Conclusion
The conflict in the Gulf has not broken the internet. It has revealed how close to breaking it already was. For decades, the assumption embedded in global network planning was that redundancy and rerouting would absorb any single disruption, that the internet’s famous resilience would hold, regardless of what happened above the cables that carried it. That assumption was tested in February 2024, when the Rubymar dragged its anchor through the Red Sea and severed 25% of Asia-Europe traffic. It was tested again in September 2025, when two further cables were cut near Jeddah. Each time, cables were repaired, and traffic was rerouted, often after weeks of diminished capacity and at significant cost. Each time, the deeper problem was identified and left unaddressed: too few repair ships, too much traffic through narrow corridors, and no governance framework capable of preventing the next incident.
The 2026 conflict has removed the margin. Both corridors are now simultaneously compromised. The repair fleet cannot operate. The next generation of cable infrastructure: 2Africa Pearls, SEA-ME-WE 6, and WorldLink are suspended or cancelled. The data centers that were meant to make the Gulf a global cloud hub have been struck by drones and partially evacuated. What was a theoretical risk has become a structural condition, and it will not simply resolve when the fighting stops. The cables that are broken will take months to repair after access is restored. The projects that have been cancelled will take years to replace. The enterprise customers who migrated workloads out of the region may have to reconsider their investments.
Global investment in submarine cable infrastructure between 2025 and 2027 was forecast to exceed US$13 billion, the highest level of capital commitment to undersea networks since the dot-com era.[16] A significant portion of that investment is now being redirected. Meta’s Project Waterworth is being designed to bypass the Middle East entirely. The Trans-Caspian Fiber Optic cable, scheduled for commercial service in the third quarter of 2026, is being repositioned from a regional connectivity project into a strategic alternative to a corridor that is no longer reliable. Overland Eurasian routes, long dismissed as too slow and too expensive for trunk traffic, are receiving renewed attention from operators who have run out of better options.
What is emerging, under the pressure of conflict rather than the guidance of policy, is a more distributed global network, one with more routes, more owners, and more redundancy than existed two years ago. And the legal frameworks that might have created consequences for cable damage, deterred hybrid warfare targeting digital infrastructure, or accelerated repair operations remain exactly where they were when the 1884 treaty was signed, entirely inadequate to the moment.
The internet will survive this conflict. It survived the Rubymar as it did the 2025 Jeddah cuts. It will absorb, reroute, and degrade, and eventually, when the cables can be repaired and the projects restarted, it will recover. But the architecture that emerges from this crisis will be different from the one that entered it: more distributed, more corporate, more contested, and more aware of its own fragility. The question that remains unanswered and that no private capital allocation decision can resolve is who gets to decide what that map looks like, and in whose interests it is drawn.
[1] “Subsea Cable Cuts in Red Sea Increase Data Delays,” The Maritime Executive, 2025, https://maritime-executive.com/article/subsea-cable-cuts-in-red-sea-increase-data-delays.
[2] “Two Cables and the Hidden Subsea Battle Between US and China,” Bloomberg, October 3, 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-us-vs-china-undersea-internet-cables.
[3] Erin L. Murphy and Thomas Bryja, “The Strategic Future of Subsea Cables: Egypt Case Study,” Center for Strategic & International Studies, November 12, 2025, https://www.csis.org/analysis/strategic-future-subsea-cables-egypt-case-study.
[4] NEOM, “DataVolt signs agreement with NEOM to design and develop the region’s first truly sustainable, net-zero AI factory campus in Oxagon,” 2025, https://www.neom.com/en-us/newsroom/datavolt-signs-agreement-with-neom.
[5] Winston Qiu, “War in the Gulf Severs the World’s Digital Arteries: How the Iran Conflict Is Reshaping Global Connectivity,” Submarine Cable Networks, March 15, 2026, https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/nv/insights/war-in-the-gulf-severs-the-world-s-digital-arteries.
[6] Erin L. Murphy and Thomas Bryja, “The Strategic Future of Subsea Cables: Egypt Case Study,” CSIS, November 12, 2025, https://www.csis.org/analysis/strategic-future-subsea-cables-egypt-case-study.
[7] Winston Qiu, “War in the Gulf Severs the World’s Digital Arteries: How the Iran Conflict Is Reshaping Global Connectivity.”
[8] ANDREW BLUM and CAREY BARAKA, “Sea change,” Rest of World, May 10, 2022, https://restofworld.org/2022/google-meta-underwater-cables/.
[9] “Expert Comment: What does Meta’s undersea cable plan mean for geopolitics?,” University of Oxford, March 10, 2025, https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-03-10-expert-comment-what-does-meta-s-undersea-cable-plan-mean-geopolitics.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Mouza Hasan Almarzooqi, “Wired for Dominance: China’s Undersea Cable Strategy,” TRENDS Research & Advisory, August 8, 2025, https://trendsresearch.org/insight/wired-for-dominance-chinas-undersea-cable-strategy/; UN General Assembly, Convention on the Law of the Sea, A/CONF.62/122, Article 113, December 10, 1982, https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/unclos_e.pdf.
[12] Dale Aluf, “China’s Subsea-Cable Power Play in the Middle East and North Africa,” Atlantic Council, May 2023, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/ChinasGrowingInfluence_052423-1.pdf.
[13] UN General Assembly, Convention on the Law of the Sea, A/CONF.62/122, Article 79, December 10, 1982.
[14] “China’s subsea cable drive defies U.S. sanctions,” Nikkei Asia, June 26, 2024, https://asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/the-big-story/china-s-undersea-cable-drive-defies-u.s.-sanctions.
[15] Alan Weissberger, “TechCrunch: Meta to build $10 billion Subsea Cable to manage its global data traffic,” IEEE ComSoc Technology Blog, December 1, 2024, https://techblog.comsoc.org/2024/12/01/1073140/.
[16] Winston Qiu, “War in the Gulf Severs the World’s Digital Arteries: How the Iran Conflict Is Reshaping Global Connectivity.”
