⏱ 5 min read | Last updated: June 2026
Executive Summary
There are roughly 550 active or planned submarine cable systems crossing the world's ocean floors, and they carry an estimated 95 percent of all intercontinental internet traffic. For most of history, these cables were owned by consortiums of national telecoms. That era is over. According to a 2022 Atlantic Council analysis, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon now own or lease approximately 70 percent of undersea bandwidth globally. In March 2026, the US Congress introduced the bipartisan Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2026 in direct response to Chinese and Russian threats to this infrastructure.
When you send a message from Mumbai to New York, or a bank in London executes a trade in Singapore, the data does not travel through satellites or some abstract cloud. It travels through a fiber optic cable, roughly the diameter of a garden hose, lying on the floor of the ocean, in complete darkness, under thousands of meters of water.
Who owns the cables under the ocean? The answer has changed dramatically over the past decade, and the shift has consequences that go well beyond business. It touches national security, digital sovereignty, and the question of who controls the physical infrastructure of the modern internet.
So, who actually owns undersea internet cables? The answer is no longer governments or traditional telecoms. It is, increasingly, the same four technology companies that already dominate your digital life.
Key Takeaways
- Tech giants dominate ownership: Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon collectively own or lease an estimated 70 percent of undersea bandwidth, according to the Atlantic Council's 2022 Digital Forensic Research Lab analysis.
- Google alone holds significant ownership stakes in at least 20 cable systems and is building more, including a planned cable connecting Chile to Australia for the first time.
- In early 2025, a ship linked to a Chinese company deliberately severed a cable connecting Taiwan to outlying islands. A Taiwanese court later convicted the captain. Five weeks later, a second cable was cut by another Chinese-owned vessel.
- The US Congress introduced the bipartisan Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2026 in March 2026, which would impose sanctions on individuals who intentionally damage these cables.
- Over 100 cable faults are reported annually, with most caused by fishing trawlers, ship anchors, and seismic activity rather than deliberate attacks.
From Telegraphs to Tech Giants: How Ownership Changed
The first submarine telegraph cable crossed the Atlantic in 1858. By 1872, according to Wikipedia's documented history of submarine communications, every continent except Antarctica had been linked by undersea cable. The infrastructure of global communication has always run under the sea.
For most of the 20th century, cables were owned by consortiums: groups of national telecoms, many of them state-backed, that jointly funded construction and shared capacity. The model ensured that no single company or country controlled a cable outright. Ownership was distributed, often messy, but broadly plural.
That changed quietly over the past decade. As internet traffic exploded and tech companies found themselves moving enormous volumes of their own data between continents, they started building their own private cables rather than buying capacity on shared ones. Google's Dunant cable, connecting the United States to France, was built entirely for Google's own traffic. Its Equiano cable runs from Portugal down the west coast of Africa. Its Firmina cable connects the US to Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.
A 2022 analysis from the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab found that Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon now own or lease approximately 70 percent of undersea bandwidth globally. Google alone has significant ownership stakes in at least 20 cable systems. These are not shared consortium cables. They are private cables, built for their own traffic, on their own terms.
The Cable Map That Looks Like a Colonial Map
Look at a map of global submarine cable routes and something becomes immediately apparent. The densest concentrations of cables connect North America to Europe, and the Pacific routes between the US, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Africa, South America, and much of the Pacific are linked by far fewer cables, many of which are aging.
The geography is not accidental. Cables were historically built to serve existing economic relationships. The routes that move the most money got the most cables. Regions that were economically peripheral to the major powers that built early cable networks remain, in many cases, less connected today.
This is changing, partly through tech company expansion and partly through geopolitical competition. In February 2026, the United States pledged $132 million to bring the Marshall Islands and American Samoa into Google's Pacific Connect plan, which the Honolulu Investment Summit described as vital for providing trusted infrastructure in an area where competing Chinese options remain available. The cable map is no longer just about economics. It is about which country's infrastructure connects which region.
The Bigger Picture: When a US government body describes Google's cable as "trusted infrastructure" and explicitly contrasts it with Chinese alternatives, the line between private corporate asset and geopolitical tool has effectively disappeared. The cable is both, simultaneously, and nobody governing it was elected by the people it serves.
The Cutting of Cables Near Taiwan
Most cable damage is mundane. Fishing trawlers drag anchors across the seabed, ship anchors snag fiber lines, earthquakes shift the ocean floor. According to research cited by the University of Washington's Jackson School, over 100 cable faults are reported each year, and the vast majority have entirely innocent explanations.
But 2025 brought incidents that could not be explained away.
A ship owned by a Chinese company and operating under a third-country flag anchored in a restricted maritime zone off Taiwan in early 2025 in a deliberate attempt to cut a cable linking the main island to outlying areas. A Taiwanese court later convicted the ship's captain of deliberately damaging telecommunications equipment. Five weeks later, another transoceanic cable was cut by a ship owned by China, which then fled undetected. Neither incident was reported in the international media.
That last detail is worth sitting with. Two deliberate cable cuts near Taiwan in early 2025, and almost no international press coverage. According to testimony submitted to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission in March 2026, cables connecting Taiwan and the Matsu Islands were severed 12 times between 2023 and early 2026, resulting in repair costs estimated at $2.9 million USD.
In the Baltic Sea, a series of cable disruptions in late 2024 triggered a different kind of response. Following undersea fiber optic cable cuts in the Baltic Sea in December 2024, NATO established the Critical Undersea Infrastructure Network to conduct information and threat intelligence sharing among private and public sector actors to protect submarine cables. Western intelligence officials pointed to Russian-linked vessels. Finland's intelligence agency, Supo, assessed the damage as more likely accidental, caused by poorly maintained ships from Russia's shadow fleet. The two assessments have not been reconciled.
What Laws Actually Protect These Cables
This is where the picture becomes genuinely uncomfortable. The cables carry 95 percent of global internet traffic, trillions of dollars in daily financial transactions, and military communications. The legal framework protecting them is thin.
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea requires states to protect submarine cables, but it has no meaningful enforcement mechanism. Damaging a cable in international waters is technically a crime in most jurisdictions, but prosecution is extremely rare. Vessels responsible for the Taiwan and Baltic incidents faced little or no international consequence.
The Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2025 was introduced in the US Senate to bolster punishments for subsea cable damage and require the president to impose sanctions against foreign individuals who have intentionally damaged subsea fiber optic cables. That bill was then followed by a 2026 version with broader scope. The Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2026 addresses the operational and diplomatic dimension: ensuring the US government has the organizational capacity, international coordination, and response mechanisms to protect existing cables from sabotage.
The EU published its own Cable Security Action Plan in February 2025, including a surveillance mechanism for Baltic Sea cables. ASEAN published guidelines for submarine cable resilience later that year. These are meaningful steps. But they are also reactive, written after incidents had already occurred.
What Comes Next
The immediate pressure point is Taiwan. US-China Commission testimony from March 2026 described the development of purpose-built cable-cutting vessels and PLA-linked patents as a qualitative shift from improvised tactics toward preparation for systematic wartime disruption. Taiwan's cable landing stations are concentrated in just two metropolitan areas, making them vulnerable to strikes that could disconnect the island from global communications simultaneously. Taiwan has begun investing in satellite backup systems, but satellites carry a fraction of the data capacity of fiber optic cables.
The bifurcation of the global cable network along geopolitical lines is already underway. The US is funding friendly-nation cables explicitly to counter Chinese alternatives in the Pacific and Indian Ocean. China is expanding its Digital Silk Road cable network across regions where Western cables are absent or limited. The result, over the next decade, could be two partially separate cable ecosystems, each serving different political blocs. The internet has always had a physical geography. That geography is now being deliberately shaped by great power competition.
Repair capacity is a separate, underreported constraint. There are only around 60 cable repair ships globally, operated by a small number of specialized companies. A coordinated attack on multiple cables in the same region, or even a coincidence of faults, could produce repair backlogs lasting weeks. The 2026 legislation addresses deterrence. It does not meaningfully address recovery speed.
What is clear is that the cables are no longer just infrastructure. They are leverage. The country or company that owns or can threaten them holds a form of power that does not appear in any defence budget or diplomatic treaty. The ocean floor has become, quietly and without most people noticing, one of the most contested spaces on earth.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Who owns the underwater cables that carry the internet?
Ownership is split between large technology companies, traditional telecoms, and some government-backed entities. According to a 2022 Atlantic Council analysis, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon collectively own or lease approximately 70 percent of global undersea bandwidth.
Q: How many submarine cables are there in the world?
According to TeleGeography's Submarine Cable Map, there are roughly 550 active or planned submarine cable systems worldwide as of 2025 to 2026.
Q: Can submarine cables be cut deliberately?
Yes. In early 2025, a Taiwanese court convicted a ship captain of deliberately cutting a cable linking Taiwan to outlying islands. Baltic Sea cables were also disrupted in late 2024 in circumstances that remain disputed.
Q: What is the Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2026?
It is a bipartisan US bill introduced in March 2026 that would impose sanctions on individuals who intentionally damage subsea fiber optic cables, establish interagency coordination on cable security, and increase US diplomatic engagement on cable protection internationally.
Q: What happens if a major submarine cable is cut?
Traffic is rerouted through other cables if capacity allows. Repair takes days to weeks and requires specialized ships, of which there are only around 60 operating globally. A simultaneous multi-cable disruption in the same region could cause significant and extended outages.
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Santhosh Vishwamitra
Web Developer and Founder of Vishwamitra Chronicles, launched in February 2026.
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