Google and Amazon are initiating a "submarine battle in the dark." Chinese enterprises should not be absent.

As the saying goes, if you want to get rich, build roads first.

Indeed, convenient transportation is an important foundation for economic development.

A well - developed transportation system can break through geographical barriers, reduce transaction costs, activate the value of resources, and ultimately promote economic development.

The circulation of goods relies on transportation infrastructure such as waterways, roads, and railways.

What kind of "roads" does data transmission rely on?

The answer is submarine cables.

A "submarine war" has begun!

Ambition

According to statistics from TeleGeography, an authoritative research institution in the telecommunications industry, there are approximately 530 active submarine cable systems globally, with a total length of about 1.48 million kilometers.

This is equivalent to circling the Earth's equator more than 35 times and is one of the largest - scale infrastructures built by humans.

Submarine cables carry more than 95% of the world's international Internet traffic and are truly the "information superhighway".

Our daily cross - border video calls, overseas online shopping, international financial transactions, etc., all rely on submarine cables.

For this reason, technology giants such as Google and Amazon are investing heavily in submarine cables, triggering a "submarine war".

On November 6th, Amazon officially announced the launch of a new trans - Atlantic submarine cable project called "Fastnet".

This cable will connect Maryland in the United States with County Cork in Ireland and is expected to be put into operation in 2028.

News report

In June of the same year, Google signed an agreement with the Chilean government regarding the construction of a submarine cable.

According to the agreement, Google and the Chilean government will jointly lay a 14,800 - kilometer - long cable on the seabed of the South Pacific, connecting the Chilean port city of Valparaíso and Sydney, Australia. It is expected to be put into use in 2027 after completion.

It is estimated that the investment in this project may range between $300 million and $550 million, with most of the costs to be borne by Google.

This is not Google's first investment in building submarine cables.

As early as 2019, the Curie cable connecting the west coast of the United States and Chile was completed and put into use, becoming Google's first fully private intercontinental cable.

The Curie cable starts from Los Angeles, California, in the United States and extends along the Pacific coast to Valparaíso, 120 kilometers northwest of Santiago, the capital of Chile, with a total length of 10,000 kilometers.

As of November 2025, Google has participated in the investment or construction of as many as 33 submarine cables, of which 6 are private.

Distribution map of submarine cables invested and built by Google

Google is controlling a large and ever - expanding global cable network.

Meta also has big ambitions.

In February this year, Meta officially announced an investment of $10 billion to launch a submarine cable project called Waterworth.

The Waterworth project is more than 50,000 kilometers long and has landing points in the United States, Brazil, India, South Africa and other places. After completion, it will become the world's longest submarine cable project.

Driven by technology giants, the investment in submarine cable projects will reach $13 billion between 2025 and 2027, almost twice the investment between 2022 and 2024.

Importance

Why are Google, Amazon and others so interested in submarine cables?

The core reason, of course, is the extreme importance of submarine cables.

From a business perspective, investing in self - built submarine cables also has multiple benefits.

First, improve performance.

The oldest submarine cable still in service globally was put into use in 1989.

Although it has been operating stably for 36 years, its performance can no longer keep up with the needs of the times.

Submarine cable being laid

As latecomers with deep pockets, Google, Amazon and others can use the latest materials and technologies when investing in the construction of submarine cables, significantly improving the performance of the cables.

Take Amazon's Fastnet submarine cable as an example. Its designed capacity is not less than 320 Tb/s, and the transmission rate is equivalent to being able to transmit 12.5 million high - definition movies per second.

Meta plans to introduce a new burial technology in the Waterworth project to effectively prevent the cable from being damaged by dangerous factors such as ship anchors, further improving the reliability and safety of the submarine cable.

Faster and safer submarine cables can provide users with a lower - latency and higher - speed network experience.

Second, optimize costs.

Meta's investment of $10 billion in the Waterworth project is indeed a huge investment.

Considering that Meta's net profit in 2024 was $62.36 billion, and spreading this investment over the next few decades, the $10 - billion investment is not that exaggerated.

Meta owns applications such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which generate a huge amount of data traffic. It has to spend a large amount of money on broadband services every year.

In the long run, self - built cables are also more cost - effective than renting third - party bandwidth.

Third, achieve strategic autonomy.

Owning its own cable means having absolute control over the core network, avoiding the bottlenecks and interruption risks that may occur when renting capacity from telecom companies.

Based on the above reasons, technology giants are investing in the construction of submarine cables.

Great Changes

Currently, the explosive growth of artificial intelligence is also forcing technology giants to pay more attention to submarine cables.

Compared with previous Internet traffic, artificial intelligence has higher requirements for submarine cables.

Artificial intelligence needs to transmit massive amounts of data in the order of PB (1 PB = 1 million GB) between data centers around the world during large - model training and inference.

Large - model training generates massive amounts of data

Especially when using the "data parallel" or "model parallel" strategy, GPU computing clusters around the world need to synchronize data frequently.

Every 1 - millisecond increase in latency may mean an increase of several hours or even days in the completion time of the training task, directly resulting in huge power and time costs.

If the cable is interrupted, it may cause the interruption or even failure of an AI training task worth millions of dollars, wasting all the consumed computing resources. The consequences are almost catastrophic.

High - reliability submarine cables have risen from a business need to a survival need.

This is why technology giants are investing in the construction of submarine cables.

For a long time, submarine cables have been jointly owned by telecom operators, and technology companies rent capacity according to their needs.

Now, technology giants are gradually breaking this rule and becoming the direct owners of submarine cables.

Google, Amazon, Meta and others have evolved from simple providers of Internet services to controllers of global network infrastructure.

The competition logic in the digital technology field has also changed greatly.

In the future, whoever dominates cable construction and controls the flow of data may gain an advantage in the digital technology competition.

Chinese enterprises must not miss this "submarine war" that concerns global digital discourse power!

This article is from the WeChat public account "Zhengjieju", and the author is Zhengjieju. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.