Most of the world’s data – email, financial transactions, the Internet – is carried by fiber optic cables that run along the ocean floor and converge at a few narrow choke points. From time to time, policy makers will issue reports saying that this arrangement looks risky, but these routes are the shortest, most frequently used, since the telegraph era, and the system has managed remarkably well. Cables regularly break and traffic is diverted until a repair ship arrives and repairs the cut. But the war in Iran, followed by years of disruption from the conflict in Yemen, is prompting governments and companies to consider alternative routes, including routes across the North Pole.
The current problems began in 2024, when a Houthi missile struck a cargo ship in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait off the coast of Yemen, causing the ship to drift for several days and dragging its anchor along three of the more than a dozen submarine cables strung in the narrow Red Sea passage.
The cable is repaired by special vessels that catch the broken ends and join them back together. It’s a delicate task that involves slowly dragging grapes across the ocean floor and floating them motionless for hours while stringing together threads of fiber, neither of which can be done safely in a war zone. As a result, it took more than four months to make the necessary arrangements to bring in a ship. Last September, another four cables were broken, possibly by a commercial ship dragging its anchor, causing Internet traffic to be disrupted again in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Then, months of negotiations took place before repairs could be made.
“The Persian Gulf will never go back to what it was before.”
The Red Sea prompted companies and governments to look for alternative routes, and the Strait of Hormuz looked promising. Then the US and Israel attacked Iran, cable projects were halted and now the world is once again looking elsewhere.
“When the Red Sea shut down everything, everybody went to the Persian Gulf, and now you can’t even do that,” said Roderick Beck, a cable industry veteran who sources telecommunications capacity for ISPs. “The Persian Gulf will never go back to what it was before, when the Iranians will not dare to assert control.”
Gulf countries, which are aggressively building data centers in an effort to shift their economies from oil to AI, are trying to avoid the Red Sea by building a route to Europe through Syria, Iraq and Oman. But the most ambitious proposal is in Europe, where frequent cable cuts have the continent looking to the Arctic.
Earlier this year, an EU panel on cable flexibility recommended building two Arctic cables to find a route to Asia without traveling through the Red Sea, where 90% of Europe’s traffic currently passes. A cable will pass through Canada’s Northwest Passage. The other will go directly across the North Pole and connect Scandinavia to Asia.
The second of these routes is already in the early planning stages. Called Polar Connect, it is being led by Nordic academic-network operators, Sweden’s Polar Research Agency and telecoms firm GlobalConnect Carriers. This year, the EU designated it a “cable project of European interest” and earmarked approximately 9 million euros for preparatory work. (The EU report estimates the full cost to be around €2 billion.) A route survey is planned for this summer.
“This started before the unrest, but the geopolitical situation has led to increased interest in finding an alternative route,” said Par Jansen, senior vice president of carriers at GlobalConnect, a telecom company that is working on the polar project. The group’s white paper states that data from Europe currently have three routes to Asia, none of them ideal: via the Red Sea, via Russia, or via the US, “longer routes controlled by non-European entities.” The cable will make Europe’s data infrastructure more flexible, with lower latency between the EU and Asia and “strengthen Europe’s autonomy,” Jansen said, adding it could also allow better environmental monitoring of the Arctic.
“The problem is icebergs”
Others have attempted Arctic cables, but never successfully. “People have talked about this for at least 20 years,” said Alan Mauldin, research director at cable industry research firm Telegeography. Installation would be challenging and expensive, requiring refitting a cable ship for Arctic conditions and purchasing icebreakers to transport it across the North Pole. But the real hurdle is maintenance.
“What if there’s some damage to the cable, it’s called ice scour, when ice hits the cable and damages it. Then you can’t repair it until the summer,” Mauldin said. “We’ve seen a lot of projects come and go. There’s a reason for it, right? It’s very challenging.”
Beck raised the same repair issue. “The problem is icebergs,” Beck said. They can drag along the bottom of the ocean floor, digging long furrows deeper than a cable can be buried. “That’s what happened to Quintilian. Twice.”
Quintilian was the last attempt at an Arctic cable. In 2016 it acquired the assets of Arctic Fiber Of earlier Attempt to build an Arctic cable between Europe and Asia. Quintilian activated a portion that ran from Nome to Prudhoe Bay along the north coast of Alaska, but sea ice broke it in June 2023. Because there are no icebreaker cable ships, Quintilian had to wait for the ice to melt in the summer before repairing the cable. Then in January last year the iceberg hit once again. This time no one could repair the cable for eight months in the deep winter. The remaining route was never laid.
Expensive repair costs and the potential for long periods of downtime make Arctic cables economically unattractive, Mauldin and Beck said. The question is whether governments now consider the cable to be more strategically important than it is. Beck said, “I think the EU is really big on this thing because they think it’s data sovereignty, but it would be very expensive. It’s never been done before.”
Jansson is aware of the challenges, but believes that the new geopolitical situation and new technologies will make it possible. Tech companies building data centers in the Nordic countries will want fast and flexible connectivity, he said, but that will ultimately require public investment. He estimated the cost of the Norway-Japan phase at “less than 1 billion euros”.
It aims to go live in 2030. This may be the easy part.
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