“Ninety-five percent of global internet traffic travels through cables you can cut with an anchor—and every one of them comes ashore somewhere.” Submarine cable landings are the coastal facilities where undersea fiber-optic cables connect to terrestrial internet infrastructure, serving as the physical interface between the global digital economy and the sovereign territory of the nations that host them.
Executive Summary
Over 400 active submarine cable systems carry approximately 95% of all international internet traffic, voice communications, and financial transaction data—including virtually all transoceanic data flows. Landing stations are choke points of extraordinary strategic consequence: a nation that hosts, owns, or can physically access a landing station gains intelligence collection opportunities, traffic routing leverage, and the ability to disrupt data flows affecting far more than its own population. The competition between the U.S. and China to dominate cable routes, landing rights, and cable manufacturing has become one of the most consequential and least publicly discussed dimensions of digital infrastructure geopolitics.
The Strategic Mechanism
Cable landing geopolitics operates through four competitive vectors:
- Cable route ownership and consortium stakes: Chinese state-linked entities (HMN Technologies, formerly Huawei Marine; China Telecom; China Unicom) have invested in cable consortia connecting Asia, Africa, and Europe—giving Beijing stakeholder access to cables carrying non-Chinese traffic.
- Landing station host rights: The nation that grants cable landing rights controls physical access to the termination facility and can compel lawful intercept, traffic monitoring, or cable maintenance access under domestic law.
- U.S. Team Telecom reviews: The U.S. government’s Team Telecom process (FCC, DOJ, DHS, DoD) reviews landing license applications for national security risk—and has increasingly blocked or conditioned licenses involving Chinese ownership stakes in cables landing on U.S. territory.
- Sabotage and physical vulnerability: NATO and intelligence agencies have documented Russian submarine activity near cable routes in the North Atlantic, and the Baltic cable cuts of late 2024 (attributed to vessel anchor drag with suspected deliberate intent) demonstrated the vulnerability of cable infrastructure to sub-threshold gray zone attack.
Market & Policy Impact
- Baltic cable incidents, 2024: Multiple undersea cables in the Baltic Sea were severed in late 2024, disrupting communications between Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Germany, and Sweden. Investigations identified suspicious vessel movements—highlighting the physical vulnerability of cable infrastructure in shallow, high-traffic seas.
- U.S. HMN Technologies restrictions: Washington pressured multiple cable consortia to exclude HMN Technologies (the rebranded Huawei Marine) from construction and maintenance contracts, forcing costly supplier substitution and timeline delays.
- Pacific cable competition: The U.S. has funded and facilitated alternative cable routes to Pacific island nations (Palau, Micronesia, Papua New Guinea) where Chinese-built cables had been proposed, treating subsea connectivity as a sovereignty and intelligence access issue.
- Repair ship strategic significance: The limited global fleet of cable repair vessels—concentrated among a handful of operators with overlapping U.S. and Chinese relationships—represents a secondary chokepoint in cable infrastructure resilience.
- Insurance and liability frameworks: The legal and insurance frameworks governing cable damage, sabotage attribution, and repair cost allocation have not kept pace with the militarization of cable zone activity, creating unresolved liability exposure for operators.
Modern Case Study: The Baltic Cable Cuts and NATO Response, 2024–2025
In November and December 2024, at least four submarine data cables in the Baltic Sea were severed within weeks of each other, cutting connections between Germany and Finland, Sweden and Lithuania, and other Baltic states. Swedish and Finnish authorities identified a Chinese bulk carrier vessel, Yi Peng 3, as proximate to one of the cut sites—the vessel anchored in international waters for weeks as Swedish authorities sought permission to board. The incident followed the October 2023 sabotage of the Baltic Connector gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia. NATO responded by increasing maritime surveillance in the Baltic and establishing a new Baltic Sentry maritime security initiative. The episodes confirmed what infrastructure security experts had long argued: submarine cables are legally protected but physically undefended, and the threshold for plausible-deniability sabotage through anchor drag or trawl gear is negligibly low. By 2025, the EU and NATO were developing a joint cable protection framework, and multiple member states were funding domestic cable repair vessel capacity for the first time.