The European Union wants to create the Internet using a submarine cable in the Arctic

The vast majority of the world’s data—emails, financial transactions, the Internet—is transmitted by fiber-optic cables that run along the ocean floor and converge at a few narrow choke points. Periodically, policymakers will issue reports suggesting that this arrangement appears risky, but these routes are the shortest, have often been in use since the age of the telegraph, and the system has managed remarkably well. Cables break regularly, and traffic is rerouted so a repair ship can arrive and repair the pieces. But the war in Iran, which comes after several years of turmoil caused by the conflict in Yemen, is prompting governments and companies to consider alternative routes, including one that passes through the Arctic.

The current problems began in 2024, when a Houthi missile hit a cargo ship in the Bab al-Mandab Strait off the coast of Yemen, causing the ship to run aground for days and cause it to sink. Pull her anchor Through three of more than a dozen submarine cables jammed in the narrow Red Sea corridor.

Cable repair is done by Specialized ships Which fishes out broken ends and ties them back together. It’s delicate work that involves slowly dragging grapes along the sea floor and floating steadily for hours while strands of fiber are tied together, none of which can be done safely in a war zone. Consequently, it took more than four months to reach the necessary agreements Bring the ship. Last September, another happened Four cables It was cut off, most likely due to a commercial ship dragging its anchor, once again disrupting internet traffic in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Again, months of negotiations before a fix was achieved.

The Red Sea reductions prompted companies and governments to look for alternative routes, and the Strait of Hormuz looked promising. Then the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the cable projects were halted, and now the world is looking elsewhere again.

“When the Red Sea shut down everything, everyone turned to the Persian Gulf, and now you can’t do that either,” said Roderick Beck, a cable industry veteran who supplies ISPs with communications capabilities. He added: “The Persian Gulf will never return to what it was before, when the Iranians do not dare to impose their control.”

Gulf states, which are aggressively building data centers in an attempt to shift their economies from oil to artificial intelligence, are looking to avoid the Red Sea by traveling overland. Construction methods To Europe via Syria, Iraq and Oman. But the most ambitious proposal is in Europe, where frequent cable outages have prompted the continent to look to the North Pole.

Earlier this year, an EU panel was held on cable flexibility It recommended building two cables in the Arctic In order to find a way to Asia without traveling through the Red Sea, where 90% of Europe’s traffic currently passes. One cable will pass through Canada’s Northwest Passage. The other will connect Scandinavia to Asia by passing directly through the North Pole.

The second track is already in the early planning stages. This network is called Polar Connect, and is led by the Nordic academic network operators, the Swedish Polar Research Agency, and telecommunications company GlobalConnect Carrier. This year, the European Union named it a “cable project of European interest” and allocated nearly 9 million euros for preparatory work. (The EU report estimated the full cost would be about $2 billion.) A road survey is scheduled for this summer.

“It started before the unrest, but the geopolitical situation has led to increased interest in finding alternative routes,” said Bar Jansson, senior vice president (carrier) at GlobalConnect, the communications company working on the Polar project. Group white paper He points out that Europe’s data currently has three routes to Asia, none of which are ideal: via the Red Sea, via Russia, or via the United States, which is “a long route controlled by non-European entities.” The cable would make Europe’s data infrastructure more resilient, reduce latency between the EU and Asia, and “strengthen Europe’s independence,” Jansson said, adding that it could also allow for better environmental monitoring of the Arctic.

Others have tried to lay a cable in the Arctic, but have never succeeded. “People have been discussing this for at least 20 years,” said Alan Mauldin, research director at TeleGeography, a cable industry research firm. Installation would be difficult and expensive, requiring the cable ship to be refitted for Arctic conditions and the purchase of icebreakers to escort it across the Arctic. But the real drawback is maintenance.

“What if there’s damage to the cable due to what’s called ice crust, when the ice rubs against the cable and damages it. Then you can’t fix it until the summer,” Mauldin said. “We’ve seen so many projects come and go. There’s a reason for that, right? It’s very difficult.”

Beck raised the same problem of reform. “The problem is the icebergs,” Beck said. They can drag along the ocean floor, digging long canyons too deep for a cable to be buried. “That’s what happened to Quintillion. Twice.”

Quintillion was the last attempt to lay a cable in the Arctic. In 2016, it acquired assets arctic fibresthe former Trying to build a cable in the Arctic between Europe and Asia. Quintillion activated a section extending from Nome along the northern Alaska coast to Prudhoe Bay, but in June 2023, sea ice broke it. Since there were no cable ships to break the ice, Quintillion had to wait for the summer ice to melt before he could Cable repair. Then in January last year, the iceberg struck again. This time in the deep winter, No one can fix cable for eight months. The rest of the way was never laid out.

High repair costs and the potential for long downtimes make the Arctic cable financially unattractive, Mauldin and Beck said. The question is whether governments now see cable as having enough strategic importance to go beyond that. “I think the EU is really interested in this because they think it represents data sovereignty, but it would be very expensive. This has never been done before,” Beck said.

Jansson recognizes the challenges, but believes the new geopolitical situation and new technologies will make this possible. As technology companies build data centers in the Nordic countries, they will want fast and flexible connectivity, but that will ultimately require public investment, he said. The estimated cost of the match between Norway and Japan is “less than one billion euros.”

The goal is to launch in 2030. This may be the easy part.