While headlines are filled with the price of oil, the state of the Strait of Hormuz, and the movements of military fleets, there is a dimension of the conflict that remains almost invisible in public debate: what is happening on the seabed. That is, what is happening to submarine cables.
Beneath the very waters that are now at the centre of the highest geopolitical tensions in decades lie the fiber-optic cables that support the world’s digital infrastructure. They carry between 95% and 99% of all global data, depending on the source consulted. Every international financial transaction, every video call, every cloud service, every encrypted message between governments… flows through this infrastructure. A single international bank can move an average of 3.9 trillion dollars through these systems each working day. Their economic importance is very significant.
Hormuz cables
Currently, four active submarine cables pass through the Strait of Hormuz: AAE-1 (Asia Africa Europe-1), FALCON, the Gulf Bridge International Cable System (GBICS/MENA), and Tata TGN-Gulf. Together, they connect countries such as Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar to the rest of the global network.
There is one detail that deserves special attention: none of these cables run through Iranian waters. Due to long-standing diplomatic tensions with Tehran, they were all routed through Omani waters when crossing the strait. This concentrates them in an extremely narrow corridor, turning a political problem into a concrete technical vulnerability.
Distinguishing the risks
Cables break mostly by accident. Around 200 incidents occur worldwide each year, most caused by ships’ anchors or fishing trawler nets. What makes the current situation in the Strait particularly dangerous is that, since the closure declared by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on March 3, approximately 2,500 vessels have accumulated in the vicinity. Of these, about 250 are not being tracked, floating above cables that few people are considering.
This already happened in the Red Sea in 2024 when Houthi rebels damaged a cargo ship, which lost control, dragged its anchor for two weeks, and severed three submarine cables. The result was months of repairs and significant disruptions to regional connectivity. Nevertheless, some data could be rerouted.
Therefore, the risk lies not in a bomb or missile falling, though that too, but in the ships that remain there.
An unprecedented moment: two bottlenecks at once
The Strait of Hormuz is not the only critical point under pressure. Sixteen cables run through the Red Sea, carrying most of the internet traffic between Europe, Asia, and Africa and handling 17% of global traffic. Houthi attacks keep that route equally compromised.
This is the first time that two major submarine cable bottlenecks are simultaneously under threat. The redundancy that makes the global system resilient is, at this moment, severely reduced. This should be an additional cause for concern.
The anatomy of a cable and its weak points
Not all sections of a cable present the same risk or repair cost. Understanding its structure helps calibrate where they are most vulnerable:
- Landing stations: the cable emerges from the sea and connects to the terrestrial network. They are the point of maximum risk concentration, because their location is public and known.
- The coastal zone (0–200 meters deep): this is where most accidents from anchors or nets occur. The cable is armoured and often buried, and repairs are relatively quick.
- The continental slope (200–2,000 meters): vulnerable to turbidity currents and requires remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) for repair, which can take days.
- Deep waters (over 2,000 meters): the hardest to reach. Here the cable has no protective Armor, and only actors with advanced military submarine capability can operate. A break in this zone can take weeks or months to repair.
- Repeaters and amplifiers: located every 50–100 km along the cable. They represent a subtle sabotage vector, as they can be partially degraded without producing a complete cut, introducing faults that are difficult to detect and attribute.
Beyond the cable: war reaches the data centres
The conflict has taken an additional step that deserves special attention. According to the CSIS, Iran has threatened to attack data centres of major tech companies, including AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Palantir, Nvidia, and Oracle, in several countries in the Gulf region and those indirectly linked to Israeli interests. According to The Guardian, it is not merely a threat, as there have been attacks on data centres of companies like Amazon.
This represents a significant evolution in conflict doctrine, because it goes beyond just cutting physical connectivity; it is also about attacking the nodes where information is stored and processed, which are critical for both the economy and national security. In modern warfare, whoever controls the flow of data possesses a strategic advantage that transcends the purely military, showing how data centres and digital infrastructure have become the new battlefield.
What is at stake?
The consequences of a significant break in these cables would not be uniform. Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar have land connections to Saudi Arabia that offer some redundancy. The United Arab Emirates have the advantage that most of their cables land in Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman, relatively far from the tension zone. Saudi Arabia, for its part, mainly depends on its Red Sea cables.
However, none of these countries can redirect via land or satellite the entire volume of traffic that their submarine cables currently carry. Both routes are complementary, not substitutes.
Moreover, repairing them is not straightforward. Repair ships need navigation permits to enter the affected waters. In a context of active hostilities, those permits might not arrive or be greatly delayed, dragging out their arrival. Currently, only one repair ship from the company e-Marine is positioned inside the Gulf. If the Strait remains inaccessible, that single vessel would be the only resource available.
Lack of legal framework
There is a lack of international legal framework, as no global regime exists to hold a perpetrator accountable if a cable is sabotaged in international waters, which facilitates «Gray zone» attacks. The Security Council has addressed certain aspects, but these measures remain insufficient.
On top of that, each segment of a given cable is subject to different jurisdictions, whether that of the coastal state in its exclusive economic zone, that of the country where the landing station is located, or none in international deep waters. That fragmentation hinders any coordinated legal response.
