GoKawiilThe vast majority of the world’s data — emails, financial transactions, the internet — is carried by fiber optic cables that run along the ocean floor and converge at a few narrow choke points. Periodically, policymakers will release reports noting that this arrangement seems risky, but these routes are the shortest, often in use since the telegraph era, and the system has managed remarkably well. Cables break regularly, and traffic gets rerouted until a repair ship can come and fix the cut. But the war in Iran, coming after several years of disruptions from conflict in Yemen, is spurring governments and companies to consider alternate routes, including one going 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 vessel to drift for days and drag its anchor across three of the more than a dozen submarine cables crammed into the narrow Red Sea passage.
Cable repair is carried out by specialized ships that fish up the broken ends and splice them back together. It’s delicate work that involves slowly dragging grapnels along the seafloor and floating very still for hours while fiber strands are spliced together, none of which can be safely done in a war zone. Consequently, it took more than four months to broker the agreements necessary to bring in a ship. Last September, another four cables were severed, likely by a commercial vessel dragging its anchor, again disrupting internet traffic in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Again, months of negotiations before a repair could be done.
“The Persian Gulf will never go back to what it was before”
The Red Sea cuts spurred companies and governments to look for alternate routes, and the Strait of Hormuz seemed promising. Then the US and Israel attacked Iran, cable projects were halted, and now the world is looking elsewhere once again.
“When the Red Sea shut everything down, everyone swung over to the Persian Gulf, and now you can’t do that either,” said Roderick Beck, a cable industry veteran who sources telecom capacity for ISPs. “The Persian Gulf will never go back to what it was before, when the Iranians wouldn’t dare assert control.”
The Gulf states, which have been aggressively building data centers in an attempt to shift their economies from oil to AI, are looking to avoid the Red Sea by going overland, building routes to Europe via Syria, Iraq, and Oman. But the most ambitious proposal is in Europe, where the repeated cable cuts have the continent looking to the Arctic.
Earlier this year, a European Union panel on cable resilience recommended building two Arctic cables in order to find a route to Asia without traveling through the Red Sea, where 90% of Europe’s traffic currently passes. One cable would go through Canada’s Northwest Passage. The other would link Scandinavia to Asia by going straight across the North Pole.
The second of these routes is already in the early planning stages. Called Polar Connect, it’s being led by Nordic academic-network operators, Sweden’s polar research agency, and the telecom firm GlobalConnect Carrier. This year, the EU designated it a “Cable Project of European Interest” and has put approximately 9 million euros toward preparatory work. (The EU report estimated the full cost would be approximately 2 billion.) A route survey is planned for this summer.
“It started before the unrest, but the geopolitical situation has resulted in an increased interest in finding alternate routes,” said Pär Jansson, Senior Vice President (Carrier) at GlobalConnect, the telecom company working on the Polar project. The group’s white paper notes that Europe’s data currently has three routes to Asia, none of them ideal: through the Red Sea, through Russia, or through the US, a “long route controlled by non-European entities.” The cable would make Europe’s data infrastructure more resilient, lower latency between the EU and Asia, and “strengthen Europe’s autonomy,” Jansson said, adding that it could also allow for better environmental monitoring of the Arctic.
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