Key insights
- Ninety-nine percent of the world's intercontinental internet traffic depends on undersea fiber-optic cables.
- Undersea cables and gas pipelines are vital enablers of business activities and energy security.
- The "blue economy" — the economic activities set in oceans and their shores — faces emerging threats due to a more challenging geopolitical landscape and the threat of sabotage.
- The consequences of damage to undersea assets can incur costs of billions of dollars, with the greatest risk occurring in areas that rely on a single subsea cable.
- New regulation is coming into place to address and respond to threats impacting vital infrastructure.
Undersea cables are hidden but increasingly vital enablers of the global economy that most people take for granted. Everyday business activities, such as sending emails, making video calls, transmitting data and transferring money, rely on the services provided by telecommunication cables that traverse the floors of the world's seas and oceans.
Along with gas pipelines and electricity connectors, subsea cables are a critical component of global infrastructure, powering global business and maintaining energy security.
Extensive development of new facilities is reinforcing the criticality of blue economy infrastructure, supporting the expansion of the digital economy and explosion of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Among other things, subsea telecommunication cables are responsible for transmitting 99% of intercontinental internet traffic.1
As business and society become ever more reliant on critical subsea infrastructure, it creates a growing source of vulnerability. Recent sabotage attempts on cables in the Red Sea and the Nord Stream gas pipeline explosion in Europe in 2022 are examples of an emerging geopolitical threat.
While it has yet to be formally announced, NATO is understood to be backing an initiative that will make it possible to reroute internet traffic from submarine cables to space in the event of an attack.2
A vast network of underwater infrastructure with thousands of miles of submarine cables, pipelines and other critical infrastructure is vital for the flow of data, energy and resources across country borders and between continents.
As well as channeling data, submarine cables enable the transmission of electricity generated from offshore wind farms, tidal energy facilities and other marine renewables, reducing reliance on fossil fuels and supporting the transition to net zero.
With an ever-increasing need for data storage and access and increasing pressures to move forward on the journey to net zero, the reliance on this critical yet vulnerable underwater infrastructure will continue to grow.