Chinese language researchers have unveiled a brand new deep-sea device able to reducing by means of the world’s most safe subsea cables − and it has many within the West feeling a bit jittery.
The event, first revealed in February 2025 within the Chinese language-language journal Mechanical Engineering, was touted as a device for civilian salvage and seabed mining. However the capacity to sever communications traces 13,000 ft (4,000 meters) beneath the ocean’s floor − far past the operational vary of most current infrastructure − signifies that the device can be utilized for different functions with far-reaching implications for world communications and safety.
That’s as a result of undersea cables maintain the world’s worldwide web visitors, monetary transactions and diplomatic exchanges. Current incidents of cable injury close to Taiwan and in northern Europe have already raised considerations of those methods’ vulnerabilities − and suspicions concerning the function of state-linked actors.
The spine of worldwide communication
Regardless of their unassuming look, undersea cables kind the spine of contemporary communication methods. Stretching round 870,000 miles (over 1.4 million kilometers) throughout each ocean, these cables transmit nearly 100% of worldwide web communication.
Underwater cables unite the world.
TeleGeography/submarinecablemap.com, CC BY-SA
These info superhighways are a serious engine for the fashionable financial system and are indispensable for issues resembling nearly instantaneous monetary transactions and real-time diplomatic and navy communications.
If all these cables have been all of the sudden severed, solely a sliver of U.S. communication visitors could possibly be restored utilizing each satellite tv for pc in orbit.
Your complete system is constructed, owned, operated and maintained by the non-public sector. Certainly, roughly 98% of those cables are put in by a handful of companies. As of 2021, the U.S. firm SubCom, French agency Alcatel Submarine Networks and Japanese agency Nippon Electrical Firm collectively held an 87% market share. China’s HMN Tech holds one other 11%.
Tech giants together with Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft now personal or lease roughly half of the undersea bandwidth worldwide, based on evaluation by the U.S.-based telecommunications analysis group TeleGeography.
Vulnerabilities and sabotage
The very traits that make undersea cables efficient additionally render them extremely weak. Constructed to be light-weight and environment friendly, they’re uncovered to quite a lot of pure hazards, together with underwater volcanic eruptions, typhoons and floods.
However human exercise remains to be the first reason for cable injury, whether or not it’s from unintended anchor drags or inadvertent entanglement with trawler nets.
Now, safety specialists are more and more involved that future human disruptions is likely to be intentional, with nations launching coordinated assaults on undersea cables as a part of a hybrid struggle technique.
Such assaults may disrupt not solely civilian communications but additionally crucial navy networks.
An adversary, for instance, may minimize off a nation’s command constructions from intelligence feeds, sensor information and communication with deployed forces. The ramifications prolong even to nuclear deterrence: With out dependable communication, a nuclear-armed state would possibly lose the flexibility to manage or monitor its strategic weapons.
The lack of communications, even for a couple of minutes, could possibly be catastrophic. It may imply the distinction between a profitable protection and a crippling first strike.
A technician explains the undersea injury to cables round Taiwan following a 2006 earthquake.
Sam Yeh/AFP by way of Getty Photographs
Geopolitical threats
In recent times, Western policymakers have turn into notably involved concerning the capabilities of Russia and China to take advantage of the vulnerabilities of undersea cables.
One notably illustrative incident occurred in 2023 when Taiwanese authorities accused two Chinese language vessels of reducing the one two subsea cables supplying web to Taiwan’s Matsu Islands.
The ensuing digital isolation of 14,000 residents for six weeks was not an one-off episode. Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Social gathering has pointed to a sample, noting that Chinese language vessels have disrupted cable operations on 27 events since 2018.
In January 2025, Taiwan’s coast guard blamed a Cameroon- and Tanzania-flagged vessel crewed by seven Chinese language nationals and operated by a Hong Kong-based firm when an undersea cable was severed off the island’s northeastern coast.
Such incidents, usually described as gray-zone aggression, are designed to put on down an adversary’s resilience and check the bounds of response.
China’s current push to reinforce its cable-cutting capabilities coincides with a surge in its navy drills round Taiwan, together with quite a lot of current workout routines.
Comparable cable disruptions have occurred within the Baltic Sea. In October 2023, a telecom cable connecting Sweden and Estonia was broken together with a fuel pipeline. In January 2025, a cable linking Latvia and Sweden was breached, triggering NATO patrols and a Swedish seizure of a vessel suspected of sabotage tied to Russian actions.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Safety Council, even hinted at the opportunity of concentrating on undersea communication cables as retaliation for actions such because the Nord Stream pipeline explosions in 2023.
The involvement of state-linked vessels in incidents working beneath flags of comfort − that’s, registered to a different nation − additional complicates efforts to attribute and deter such assaults.
It isn’t simply safety and protection in danger. The fashionable monetary system relies on the belief of steady, high-speed connectivity; any interruption, nonetheless transient, may disrupt markets, halt buying and selling and result in vital financial losses.
The undersea battlefield
Given the strategic significance of undersea cables and the multifaceted dangers they face, Western governments intent on stopping additional battle could be clever to discover a complete and internationally coordinated approach to safe the infrastructure towards threats.
One clear choice could be to bolster restore and upkeep capacities. Presently, a major vulnerability stems from the overreliance on Chinese language restore ships. China’s sturdy maritime business and state-supported investments in world telecommunications has contributed to the Asian nation taking a outstanding place with regards to cable restore ships.
The safety of undersea cables mustn’t, I consider, be seen because the duty of any single nation however as a collective precedence for all nations reliant on this infrastructure. As such, worldwide frameworks and agreements may facilitate info sharing, standardize safety protocols and set up fast response mechanisms within the occasion of a cable breach.
However such worldwide efforts could be combating towards the tide. The incidents in Taiwan, the Baltic Sea and elsewhere come as nice energy competitors intensifies between the U.S. and China.
China, in creating deep-water cable-cutting expertise, could also be sending a message of intent. In the meantime, the Trump administration’s “America First” method alerts a shift that might complicate efforts to foster partnerships for the final world good.
The protection of undersea cables displays the challenges of our hyperconnected world, requiring a steadiness of innovation, technique and cooperation. However as nations together with China and Russia seemingly check and probe this important world infrastructure, it seems the methods underpinning the West’s prosperity and safety may turn into one in every of its best vulnerabilities.
