🌊 As you read this page, your data is racing through the darkness 8,000 meters below the ocean surface — at the speed of light.

99% of all international internet traffic flows through roughly 500 submarine cables stretched across the world's seabeds. And about 90% of new construction is done by just three companies: SubCom (US), Alcatel Submarine Networks (France), and Japan's NEC.

On April 27, 2026, the Toyo Keizai weekly business magazine published a cover story laying out NEC's ambition to capture 35% of the global submarine cable market. This isn't just a corporate target. It's about hegemony in the AI era, geopolitics, and economic security — the silent war happening on the ocean floor.

The Invisible Giant: How Submarine Cables Run the World

Submarine cables are the literal arteries of modern civilization. Netflix streams, ChatGPT responses, international remittances, military communications faster than satellites can carry — almost all of it travels through fiber-optic cables 2 to 3 centimeters thick, snaking between continents on the ocean floor.

Worldwide, around 1.5 million kilometers of submarine cable have been laid — enough to circle the Earth 37 times. The market was valued at roughly $31.7 billion in 2024, and is expanding rapidly thanks to AI and data center demand.

What makes this market unusual is how few players it has. Building equipment that must function for 25 years at depths of 8,000 meters, securing permits across multiple jurisdictions, and operating specialized cable-laying ships — only four companies in the world can do all of it.

Rank Company Country Estimated Share
1 SubCom United States ~40%
2 Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) France ~20%
3 NEC Japan ~21–25%
4 HMN Technologies (formerly Huawei Marine) China ~11%

The top three account for roughly 90% of new construction worldwide.

NEC's Strength: 60 Years of "Made in Japan" Trust

NEC's submarine cable business is older than most people realize. Since 1964, the company has laid over 400,000 kilometers of cable — equivalent to ten times around the Earth.

The manufacturing heart of the operation is OCC (Ocean Cable & Communications), an NEC subsidiary with a major plant in Kitakyushu, Japan. Everything from the cable itself to the related equipment is produced domestically. This is exceptionally rare in modern global supply chains, and it's NEC's decisive competitive moat: customers don't have to depend on foreign vendors for critical infrastructure.

In June 2025, NEC President Takayuki Morita went on record with Nikkei: he sees a path to 40% global market share. Behind that statement sits roughly 400 billion yen (about $2.5 billion at recent exchange rates) in M&A capacity that the company can deploy without damaging its credit rating.

Tokyo's Wake-Up Call: A National 35% Target

Until very recently, the Japanese government was strikingly hands-off about the submarine cable industry. That has changed.

In June 2025, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications published its "Comprehensive Strategy for Digital Overseas Expansion," which for the first time set an explicit national target: Japanese companies should account for at least 35% of the total length of submarine cables laid worldwide between 2026 and 2030. R&D funding, cable-laying ship procurement support, and production capacity expansion are all on the table — areas that the private sector alone cannot fully finance.

This isn't a sudden pivot. Look at what other governments have done:

  • France: In late 2024, the government bought ASN from Finland's Nokia, effectively nationalizing it.
  • United States: SubCom has long been backed by the Department of Defense as a key customer. In late 2025, the FCC adopted new rules effectively barring Chinese and Russian entities from cable projects connecting to US territory.
  • China: HMN was integrated into the national "Digital Silk Road" strategy and competes globally with prices 20–30% below Western rivals.

Submarine cables have stopped being just telecommunications infrastructure. They're now strategic assets moved by the will of governments.

The AI Demand Tsunami: Hyperscalers Are Now the Owners

Why has every government suddenly gotten serious about cables? The answer is straightforward: the AI and data center boom.

A decade ago, submarine cables were funded mostly by consortia of telecom carriers. Today, four companies — Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon — collectively own or lease roughly half of all undersea bandwidth globally. Google alone has invested in more than 30 cables. Meta has announced "Project Waterworth," a 50,000-kilometer cable system spanning five continents with a budget exceeding $10 billion.

Takahiro Kashima, a senior professional in NEC's Marine Sales Division, told METI Journal that "demand from hyperscaler customers like Meta and Google for ever-larger cable capacity is the central force shaping our business right now."

There was also a symbolic moment. In 2024, NEC won a contract to build a transatlantic cable for Meta — NEC's first entry into the Atlantic, and a recovery from a painful 2020 loss when it failed to win the JUPITER cable connecting Japan, the US, and the Philippines.

The "Territorial" Logic Is Breaking Down

The Big Three traditionally had geographic territories: SubCom owned the Americas, ASN dominated Europe, and NEC ruled the Asia-Pacific. Permitting, coastal geography, fishery negotiations — these are areas where local trust and relationships matter enormously.

But the AI-era hyperscalers don't respect those boundaries. NEC just won an Atlantic cable for Meta. European players are pushing into Pacific contracts. For NEC this is opportunity, but it also means competitors will invade their backyard.

Morita's confidence — "given how strong demand is in the Pacific and Asia, taking 40% share would not be unusual" — rests on the absolute scale of demand growth in NEC's home region, which can absorb new entrants without crushing the incumbent.

The Quiet Lockout of China's HMN

The biggest structural shift in the industry is the systematic exclusion of China's HMN.

Originally Huawei Marine, HMN grew rapidly by riding China's "Digital Silk Road" strategy, undercutting Western rivals by 20–30% and supplying roughly 18% of new cables over the past four years.

But Western caution hardened sharply through 2025:

  • January–February 2025: Taiwan experienced four submarine cable disruptions in two months. CSIS and Recorded Future reported that a Tanzania-flagged cargo vessel controlled by a Hong Kong company disabled its tracking system before dragging its anchor across a critical Trans-Pacific cable.
  • 2024–2025: The Baltic Sea saw four incidents damaging eight cables, with vessels linked to China and Russia operating under suspicious circumstances.
  • July 2025: CSIS warned that China had unveiled a new ship purpose-built for cutting submarine cables.
  • Late 2025: The US FCC adopted rules effectively prohibiting Chinese and Russian companies from connecting submarine cables to US territory.

The SeaMeWe-6 cable — connecting 15 countries across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe — became a symbolic battleground. HMN had submitted the cheapest bid and was on the verge of winning, before a US interagency task force ("Team Telecom") intervened behind the scenes and the contract ultimately went to SubCom.

The world's submarine cables are now splitting into two parallel systems: trusted suppliers and Chinese-affiliated suppliers. NEC's position as the third trusted partner inside the US-Japan alliance and the broader G7 network is strategically priceless.

The Hard Constraints: Ships, Repairs, and Risk

NEC's ambitions face real ceilings, though. The whole industry is grappling with structural problems.

The ship shortage. The number of dedicated cable-laying ships worldwide is sharply limited, and demand has surged. NEC has secured vessels through long-term charter contracts, but without government support, scaling up is difficult.

Repair capacity is even worse. Fewer than 100 cable repair vessels exist globally, and many are aging. China-affiliated SBSS dominates regional repair markets and has been accused of "deliberate delays" in sensitive areas like the South China Sea.

Unpredictable risk. Weather delays, country-by-country permitting timelines, fishery coordination, unexpected seabed conditions — submarine cable work is "succeed and it's expected, fail and you lose hundreds of millions." NEC's Kashima admitted plainly: "It's a high-risk business, but we have to fight globally."

NEC's Two-Front Strategy: AI and Cables

Here's the wrinkle that makes NEC's positioning fascinating right now.

On April 23, 2026 — just four days before the Toyo Keizai cable story dropped — NEC announced a strategic partnership with Anthropic, becoming the first Japanese company named as a "Claude global partner." The deal embeds Claude Opus 4.7 and Claude Cowork into NEC's enterprise solutions for banks, manufacturers, and local governments, and rolls out Claude to roughly 30,000 employees (details here).

Then on April 27, Toyo Keizai's cover story laid out the 35% submarine cable target.

In other words, NEC is going after the AI-era hegemony from both sides: software (enterprise AI through Claude) and physical infrastructure (submarine cables). The "pipes" that move the data and the "brains" that process it — NEC is trying to lock down strategic positions in both, as a Japanese company.

This isn't a Silicon Valley-style software-only play. It can't be — software alone doesn't win this game. Combining the strengths of a 125-year-old electronics manufacturer with cutting-edge AI partnerships is a portfolio strategy that neither Hitachi nor NTT nor Fujitsu has assembled in this configuration.

Why This Matters to You

Let me bring this back to your daily life.

The photos you backed up to the cloud, the audio of your last Zoom call, your international wire transfer, your online game match, your ChatGPT query — almost all of it travels through submarine cables. If those cables are cut, all of it stops.

When cables were cut in Taiwan in early 2025, residents couldn't send SMS, couldn't make payments, couldn't run e-commerce businesses. This isn't a Taiwan-only story. The US, Japan, the UK, Australia — every developed economy depends on submarine cables for ~99% of international communication.

NEC's pursuit of 35% market share, and the Japanese government's decision to make it a national target, comes from a very practical place: fear that critical infrastructure could end up in the wrong hands, and ambition to make sure it doesn't.

The hegemony being decided 8,000 meters below the surface is directly connected to the life you're living right now.

How much is submarine cable security discussed in your country? What do you think about "trusted nations" controlling critical infrastructure in the AI era? We'd love to hear your perspective.

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