The 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.
“The problem is icebergs”
Others have attempted an Arctic cable, never successfully. “People have discussed this for at least 20 years,” said Alan Mauldin, a research director at TeleGeography, the cable industry research firm. Installation would be challenging and expensive, requiring retrofitting a cable ship for Arctic conditions and procuring icebreakers to escort it across the North Pole. But the real obstacle is maintenance.
“What if there is damage to the cable from, it’s called ice scour, when ice scrapes against her cable and damages it. Then you can’t repair it until summer,” Mauldin said. “We’ve seen so many projects come and go. There’s a reason for that, right? It’s very challenging.”
Beck raised the same repair issue. “The problem is icebergs,” said Beck. They can drag along the bottom of the ocean floor, digging long grooves deeper than a cable can be buried. “That’s what happened to Quintillion. Twice.”
Quintillion was the last attempt at an Arctic cable. In 2016 it acquired the assets of Arctic Fibre, the previous attempt to build an Arctic cable between Europe and Asia. Quintillion activated a portion that ran from Nome along the northern coast of Alaska to Prudhoe Bay, but in June 2023, sea ice broke it. Because there are no icebreaker cable ships, Quintillion had to wait for the summer ice to melt before it could fix the cable. Then in January of last year, an iceberg struck again. This time in deep winter, no one could repair the cable for eight months. The rest of the route was never laid.
The expensive repair costs and potential for lengthy downtimes makes an Arctic cable financially unattractive, Mauldin and Beck said. The question is whether governments now see the cable as strategically important enough to outweigh that. “I think the EU is really big on this thing because they think it’s data sovereignty, but it would be enormously expensive. It’s never been done before,” said Beck.
Jansson is aware of the challenges, but he believes the new geopolitical situation and new technologies will make it feasible. Tech companies are building data centers in the Nordic countries, he said, and will want fast and resilient connectivity, but ultimately it will require public investment. He places the cost estimate for the Norway-Japan leg at “below 1 billion euros.”
The goal is for it to go live in 2030. That may be the easy part.