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Nearly every photo, text, or video call sent between continents travel through cables stretched across the ocean floor. And only one company in the US can both make and install them. We do things that not many people even know exist. We got rare access to its factory and boarded one of its ships loaded with enough cable to stretch across the Atlantic. They help connect Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, which together account for about 75% of the world's data. And those companies are now racing to build more to connect their data centers around the world. But just one cable can cost millions
of dollars to make. Inside each one are tiny glass fibers as thin as a human hair. If it was to be twisted, it breaks very easy. So, why does our data still need to travel across the bottom of the ocean? And what happens if a cable breaks? At SubCom's New Hampshire factory, machines run around the clock unwinding thousands of miles of glass. These fibers are the core of every subsea cable. Each one is its own data superhighway capable of carrying hundreds of terabytes of information every second across the ocean. When you send a video to a friend, it travels in radio waves from your phone to a nearby cell tower.
The waves will eventually be converted into pulses of light and sent through glass fibers underground and sea. Traveling at nearly the speed of light, a message or a video file can reach your friend's phone thousands of miles away in just a fraction of a second. A single pair of these fibers can carry enough data to make it possible for half of the humans on Earth to be talking to the other half simultaneously. But they're extremely fragile. If they bend too much, they can snap. And the slightest scratch can massively reduce the ability for light pulses to travel down it. Quality is really important in the manufacturing process cuz once this is installed in the ocean, the expectation is this is going to run for years and we
don't want to have to go out there and do any kind of repairs on it. So workers wear protective gear to keep hair or dirt from touching the fibers. This machine wraps high tensile steel wire around the cable to help protect it from damage. It's the same type of material used to suspend structures like the Golden Gate Bridge. After the steel, another layer, copper. It has to be perfectly seam welded for the entire length. The sealing keeps water out. If there's ever a flaw, even a pinhole in the copper, we have to do a repair on that immediately.
This copper casing will move electricity down the cable to a device called a repeater. Spaced about every 55 miles of cable. The device amplifies light pulses as they travel thousands of miles across the seafloor. Once they finish a cable, they test every inch of it inside this room. Where there are over 100 pans full of finished cable. Weighing about 70 tons each. To move each tank, workers have to climb up and attach it to a crane. They submerge the cable in water and pass electricity through it to make sure there are no faults.
The is designed to last at least 25 We got to make sure that once we install this, that it's going to operate for the lifetime of the network. Because the reality is to do a repair in the ocean, although it can be done, it's very complex, it's very costly, and it causes downtime for the customer. In shallow water, cables face the biggest risks. Shipping errors, bottom trawlers, rocks, and waves. So, SubCom adds another layer of steel and a coating of nylon thread and tar for extra protection. Then pulleys feed the completed cables through the ceiling and to the storage room. They make over 40,000 mi of cable a year. That's nearly enough to wrap twice around the world.
This is what the inside of a finished cable looks like. SubCom custom-builds each cable for the route it will take. Cables that run through rocky areas or near shore get extra armor. Today, the industry's biggest customers are tech giants. Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. Which are paying to connect their data centers around the world. But this factory linked continents long before the internet existed. When it opened in 1953, it was owned by Simplex Wire and Cable Company. They helped build the first transatlantic telephone cable. Which entered service in 1956.
Engineers made it out of copper wire, which could transfer phone calls using electrical signals. It was revolutionary because before TAT-1, most international calls relied on radio waves, which were a lot slower and spottier. Over the next three decades, demand for international communication skyrocketed. The factory started manufacturing new cable systems every few years. For companies like AT&T, France Telecom, and British Telecom, phone companies often share the cost of a cable and divided its capacity among themselves. But by the 1980s, the growing use of fax machines and computers pushed copper to its limits. So, this factory helped build TAT-8, the world's first transatlantic fiber optic cable.
Instead of sending electrical signals through copper, it sent pulses of light through hair-thin glass fibers, carrying far more information than copper. Engineers thought it would be the last transatlantic cable the world would ever need. Then, in 1989, the World Wide Web was invented. TAT-8 filled capacity within 18 months. As more people got online, phone and internet companies rushed to build more fiber optic cables.
By 2001, they laid roughly 100 million miles of fiber around the world within 2 years. But that was far more than people were ready to use. Everybody was running around saying, "Build it and they will come." Well, we built too much for everybody to be able to come. It took about a decade for internet traffic to catch up, driven by new, bandwidth-hungry services like video streaming and cloud computing.
Now, AI is driving another cable boom. Training and running these systems requires moving huge amounts of information between data centers around the world. It's estimated that more than half of demand for new subsea cables is coming from just four companies. But unlike earlier cables, which phone companies typically paid for and shared, big tech companies want their own private networks linking data centers across multiple continents. Last year, Meta announced Project Wolverine, its plan to build the world's longest subsea cable.
It will connect the US, Brazil, South Africa, India, Malaysia, and Australia. And is expected to cost $10 billion. Mhm. Meta hasn't revealed who will build the cable network. But SubCom has already reacted to the data center driven demand. And has doubled its cable production since 2018. But even at that, we are looking for ways to increase it further. But even with that, production isn't running fast enough. Our backlog is growing faster than we're we're getting it out the door. We went aboard one of SubCom's cable laying ships. To see why getting it out the door isn't so easy.
They're very expensive. They're very specialized. Once you spend anywhere upwards of 200 plus million dollars to buy one, then the spending starts after that. SubCom had to cut back its fleet to survive the cable oversupply in 2001. The industry went from very robust to no projects for 3 years. Now the company has just eight cable laying ships to keep up with demand. And loading and installing one line can take months.
They have to feed the cable straight from the factory to the ship. Because using trucks or rail would take too long. Repeaters arrive attached to the cable. Just one of these weighs 800 lb. And dropping it could cost the company millions of dollars. We have people spread out all over so that we do not drag the cable on deck. Which might cause like any damage or gouges. Once the workers finish loading the repeater onto the ship, we head downstairs into the cable tank. The ship is eight stories tall. So it has enough room to store thousands of miles of cable.
The only way to enter the tank is by climbing down this ladder. Workers do 12-hour shifts to make sure the cable is perfectly stacked. The process is called flicking. No gaps in between. It might pull cable from the flake under and it will cause like a cable damage. They run the operation non-stop until it is fully loaded, which can take up to a month. After months of manufacturing, testing, and loading, Captain Emad Eboli and his crew head out to sea for 2 months to lay the cable.
He even charts the route on paper in rare cases their GPS malfunctions. They plan every route to avoid earthquake zones and busy shipping lanes. [snorts] And in nearshore areas, they use machines like this one to bury it to help protect it from anchors and fishing gear. We have a port and a starboard camera that gives us a 3D visual image on what we're looking at. The machine uses high-pressure water jets to break up the sand and bury the cable. And once the boat reaches deep water beyond threat from anchors, they stop
burying the line and lay it on top of the sand. If everything goes smoothly, it takes about a year to make and lay a cable. But some of SubCom's projects now take twice as long. Like in the Red Sea, where attacks on commercial ships have made routes more dangerous and harder to build. International conflicts can dramatically impact how long it takes to finish a project. Because SubCom has to get permission from every country it plans to install cable, which can take up to 5 years. Every additional cable means starting that process again. So some of SubCom's customers are asking for higher capacity cables, allowing them to move more data without building multiple systems.
Customers are saying, "Hey, I want to simplify the installation process, the number of permits I have to get." But packing more traffic into fewer systems creates a new risk. When one gets cut, a much bigger chunk of internet can go down with it. And cuts do happen. In fact, roughly 100 cables are severed accidentally every year. Often by ship anchors. To repair them, the crew uses a remotely operated vehicle to find the cable. Then a grappling hook to pull it from the sea floor. On board, they reconnect the glass fibers with a machine called a fusion splicer. We remove all watches and jewelry when we're splicing to reduce the risk of breaking any fibers.
The machine uses cameras to line up the two ends of fiber within microns. Millions of a meter. Then it melts them together. Repairs can take weeks and cost more than a million dollars. In worst cases, a break can cut an entire country off from the internet. Like in 2022, when a volcanic eruption severed the cable connecting Tonga with the outside world. [snorts] It took 18 months to restore the internet back to normal. But not all cuts are accidental. From the Baltic Sea to the
Taiwan Strait, cable disruptions are raising fears that covert warfare is moving underwater. We saw another incident in the Baltic Sea with disruption to a cable. So far, no reason investigation has proved that a foreign government ordered the sabotage of an undersea cable. [snorts] But as the world becomes more dependent on cloud computing and AI, the cost of losing connection is rising. We now need to be thinking about the seabed um and what lies there. Ensuring their security and resilience is not only a technical issue, but also a matter of national and international security. To help protect undersea cables,
countries have ramped up their naval patrols. Near the Baltic Sea, Finland is testing out a detection system using a technology called DAS interrogators. These devices attach to the cable and turn it into a giant vibration sensor capable of recognizing nearby activity. Yet, one of the best defenses against cable cuts is simply having more cables. So, if there's an earthquake under the ocean in this section and it takes out a cable, I have other routes to get there. So, despite costing millions of dollars to make and the spiking demand for them, there's no technology that comes close to replacing subsea cables.
In rare cases, if a destination isn't connected to the fiber network, information can travel by satellite. But, fiber carries thousands of times more data than satellites. So, as AI and cloud computing drive another surge in global data, the internet's future is still being laid, one cable at a time.
