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This summary covers The Economist’s July 4th, 2026 Asia article listed in the contents as Subsea data cables and published under the headline The new geography of subsea cables.

The internet may feel weightless, but almost all international traffic still travels through fibre-optic cables on the ocean floor. Artificial intelligence is now changing where those cables go. Big technology companies need direct, high-capacity links between data centres, while governments and operators want routes that avoid politically risky waters. Together, those pressures are pulling Asia’s digital infrastructure away from familiar coastal corridors and across the open Indian and Pacific oceans.

AI changes who builds the internet

Subsea cables were traditionally financed by large consortia of national telecoms companies. That shared the expense, but it also made projects slow and complicated. The SEA-ME-WE 3 cable between Europe and Asia, which entered service in 1999, cost \$1.3bn and involved 92 partners. Because its owners mainly served population centres, the route stayed close to the Asian coastline.

The economics have shifted as Google, Meta and Microsoft have become major builders themselves. Google invested in its first cable in 2008 and has since backed at least 34 more, including 18 that it owns without partners. These companies are increasingly designing networks around their own data centres rather than existing telecom markets. With fewer parties to satisfy, they can approve projects faster and send cables along routes that would once have seemed commercially implausible.

AI supplies the urgency. Hyperscalers are expected to invest an average of about \$4bn a year in new cables over the next four years as they compete to move enormous volumes of data between computing facilities. Satellite services such as Starlink are improving, but sending a gigabyte through space remains far more expensive than transmitting it as light through fibre. Subsea cables therefore continue to carry roughly 99% of intercontinental internet traffic.

Geopolitics redraws the map

The new routes are meant less to escape sabotage than to avoid governments that can delay repairs, impose conditions or use access as leverage. Accidental damage and seismic activity account for virtually all of the roughly 200 cable breaks each year. The more strategic concern is control over the seabed.

China effectively governs cable work inside the South China Sea area marked by its “nine-dash line”, even beyond waters recognised internationally as Chinese. Repairing a cable there can require Beijing’s approval. The Strait of Malacca presents a different vulnerability: Malaysia and Indonesia can change operating rules, require local repair ships or seek more revenue from cables passing through a narrow and essential corridor.

Operators are responding by going around these choke points. New links run from the Middle East through Australia and then towards Japan, South Korea or America. An Australia-Oman cable now connects the Cocos Islands and branches to the Anglo-American military base at Diego Garcia. Google’s planned Indian Ocean network uses the Maldives and Christmas Island, while Meta’s Project Waterworth follows another long ocean route. Guam is becoming a Pacific hub for links among American allies. No new direct cable between America and China has been approved since Barack Obama was president, a sign that the physical internet is splitting along geopolitical lines.

Remote islands become strategic nodes

This shift is reviving places that had faded from communications history. In 1914 a German raiding party attacked the telegraph station on the Cocos Islands, prompting the young Royal Australian Navy’s first victory. A century later the islands again matter because cables and an upgraded airfield connect them to a wider strategic network.

That attention can bring better communications, investment and transport to remote communities. It can also make them targets. The article’s central point is that the AI race is not only about chips, models and electricity. It is also reorganising the physical routes beneath the oceans, turning forgotten islands and deep-water passages into critical infrastructure in a more divided world.