Can “Larry the Cable Guy” swim? After decades of war-gaming oil tanker blockades at Hormuz — we realize the real chokepoint was always 200 feet below the ships, made of glass, and thinner than a garden hose.
About 20% of global oil and 25% of global LNG transit the Strait of Hormuz daily — the number everyone knows. But roughly 95–99% of all global internet traffic travels through submarine fiber-optic cables, and estimates suggest up to 30% of certain global traffic routes pass through this same Hormuz corridor.
Rather than hardened military infrastructure, these cables are precision-engineered strands of glass and steel no thicker than a garden hose, laid along routes optimized for efficiency, not survivability. They sit on the ocean floor at roughly 200 feet depth, with zero protection.
More than 95% of all intercontinental data traffic travels through submarine fiber-optic cables. Not satellites. Not radio towers. Not Starlink. Physical cables lying on the ocean floor, again, often thinner than your garden hose, stretching tens of thousands of kilometers / miles between continents.
There are approximately 600 cable systems active or under construction worldwide, with 1,712 landing points. They carry everything. Every Google search, every Zoom call, every financial transaction between New York and London, every AI training job that touches data across oceans. The entire architecture of the global internet — and by extension, the entire infrastructure of AI — runs on these cables.
To swim a little deeper? There are exactly four companies on Earth with the vertically integrated capability to manufacture, lay, and maintain the 99% of the internet that runs on the ocean floor.
Four companies control it. SubCom — American. Headquartered in New Jersey. The only U.S.-based end-to-end submarine cable company. And then, Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) — French. Nationalized by the French government in December 2024 for €350 million, from Nokia. The French State called it a matter of critical infrastructure security. NEC Corporation — Japanese. But NEC doesn’t own its own cable-laying vessels. Mostly, wait for it, Chinese operators. And, lastky, HMN Tech — fully Chinese. How’s that going to play?
That’s it. Four companies.
Don’t think this is not all front of mind when these four companies watch the news? “Larry the Cable Guy” doesn’t appear to be a great swimmer. A cable ship typically takes 2–4 weeks to reach a break site, assess damage, and execute a repair — assuming the break site is accessible and politically stable. In an active war zone, it could take far longer. Repair ships obviously cannot operate safely in a mined, war-patrolled strait.
The strategic irony: the world built elaborate contingency plans around oil disruption, while the actual nervous system of the global economy — banking, cloud, AI, communications — was quietly run through the same narrow water on strands of glass nobody was watching.
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Vladyslav Klochkov
The Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea have become a threat not only to oil, but also to the entire Internet.
In the third week of the war with Iran, these two sea passages turned into a zone of active hostilities, where key undersea fiber optic cables, which provide 17 to 30% of global Internet traffic, run along the bottom.
There are dozens of cables running through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, connecting Europe, Asia and Africa. They carry the bulk of the traffic of banking systems, cloud services, data centers in the Persian Gulf, and the online connections of billions of users around the world.
Due to mines, missile and drone attacks, as well as the impossibility of repairs in the war zone, specialized cable vessels do not enter there, so the risk of cable damage is no longer theoretical. Alcatel Submarine Networks has already declared force majeure and stopped laying the Meta/2Africa Pearls cable in the Persian Gulf.
If the cables are damaged, the consequences could be much more serious than the rise in oil prices, including slowdowns in the Internet, interruptions in the operation of banks, cloud platforms, and AI services on three continents. And previous repairs of similar cables even in peacetime lasted five to six months.
