GoKawiilThe European Union is considering building two undersea cables to connect to Asia via the Arctic. One of these projects proposes to go through Canada’s Northwest Passage, while the other will start in Scandinavia and cut directly through the North Pole. According to The Verge, the EU started looking north after recent turmoil in the Middle East, where 90% of the Europe-Asia internet traffic currently transits, resulting in multiple incidents of cut cables that have led to disruption.
The current situation started in 2024, when a Houthi missile struck a ship transiting the Red Sea through the narrow strait between Yemen and Djibouti. The attack caused the ship to drift aimlessly in the area, and its anchor cut three undersea cables going through the natural chokepoint. It took more than four months of negotiations before a cable repair ship could be brought in to mend the damage without getting attacked itself.
Another incident took place in the area in September 2025, when a commercial vessel is suspected of having dragged its anchor across four cables. Negotiations needed to be carried out again for several months so that the cable repairs could occur unimpeded.
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Events like these have led some undersea cable operators to look to the Persian Gulf as an alternative, but the war between the U.S. and Iran has thrown that alternative route into turmoil. Meta, which was laying a part of its 2Africa project when the American bombing campaign began, declared force majeure and delayed the project. Furthermore, an IRGC-linked new agency has been calling on Iranian authorities to tax and control undersea cables that go through the Strait of Hormuz.
This regional instability is the primary reason why the EU is seeking new routes to Asia. At the moment, its alternatives are to either go through the United States or Russia. Going through the polar region is the only route that won’t go through territory controlled by other governments, but the proposed project, called Polar Connect, has its own challenges.
Ice and icebergs are the biggest issue with going through the Arctic region. These massive chunks of ice could scrape the seabed where the cables lie. Furthermore, there are no icebreaking cable-laying ships, so any operation would need at least two vessels, or a new cable-laying icebreaker, to get the job done. Finally, there’s the question of maintenance. Expensive repair costs due to the Arctic conditions and consequent lengthy downtimes would seem to make this route economically unfeasible.
Polar Connect isn’t the first project to try going under the Arctic ice. Quintillion, which took over the assets of Arctic Fibre in 2016, planned to connect Europe to Asia via Alaska. It has already successfully connected Nome to Prudhoe Bay, but the project has since stalled. This undersea cable broke on two occasions because of sea ice. The first incident was in June 2023, when the company needed to wait for the ice to melt before it could conduct repairs because it did not have access to an icebreaker. The other incident happened in January 2025, and Arctic Fibre then had to wait for eight months before it could access the area of the break and reconnect the cable.
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Polar Connect would appear to face similar issues, but it seems that current global geopolitics are driving Europe to invest in an alternative that isn’t subject to the whims of unstable leaders. It aims to have the cable operational by 2030, but working in the challenging conditions of the Arctic will certainly have an impact on this schedule.
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