The Subsea Compact

The problem

The internet is not in the cloud; it is on the seabed. Roughly 95 percent of intercontinental data moves through submarine fibre-optic cables, a few hundred of them, each about the width of a garden hose, laid by a fleet of about sixty specialised ships owned by a handful of companies. The equipment that sits on the ocean floor, the repeaters and branching units that keep the signal alive across 10,000 kilometres, is made by only four firms in the world: SubCom in the United States, Alcatel Submarine Networks in France, NEC in Japan, and HMN Technologies in China, formerly Huawei Marine. Whoever builds and owns a cable decides who connects, at what price, and who can listen.

Africa is being wired now, and it is the last continent where the map is still being drawn. 2Africa, at 45,000 kilometres the longest submarine cable ever built, circles the continent and links it to Europe and Asia through 46 landing points in 33 countries; its consortium includes Meta, Vodafone, Orange, Saudi Telecom, and China Mobile. Google's Equiano runs down the west coast from Portugal to South Africa with six landings, owned by Google alone. Chinese firms have built and financed a substantial share of Africa's terrestrial fibre and many of its landing stations, and the cables of the next decade, which will carry the traffic of a billion new users, are being financed today.

The pattern this catalog has described for ports (№ 006), for the grid (№ 111) and for diplomatic presence (№ 109) applies here with one difference: a cable, once laid, is nearly impossible to replace, and its ownership is its control. A landing station owned by a foreign state's contractor is a point at which that state can read, throttle or cut a nation's connection to the world. The United States has spent a decade blocking Chinese-built cables from its own shores. It has not offered Africa the alternative.

The proposal

The Subsea Compact: the United States finances, through the guarantee programme of № 111, the next generation of African submarine and terrestrial fibre, on three conditions. The landing stations are owned by the host country or its licensed operators, never by a foreign state or its contractors. The cable's capacity is open to any operator at published rates, under the host's regulation. And the Fund holds a minority share in each cable company, collecting the dividend and holding a seat. The Builder Corps trains the engineers who run the stations.

How it would work

1. The finance. Development Finance Corporation guarantees, under the authority raised for № 111, cover the debt of qualifying cable and landing-station projects in partner countries, and the American export-credit agency finances the wet plant from American or allied manufacturers. A cable financed under the Compact borrows at American rates rather than the continent's.

1. The landing station, in the host's hands. The station where the cable comes ashore, the building, the switching equipment and the connection to the national network, is owned by the host country's state or licensed private operators, and may not be owned, operated or maintained by a foreign state's enterprise. The Compact does not object to a Chinese telecom buying capacity on a cable; it objects to a Chinese state contractor holding the key to the building.

1. Open access. Capacity on a Compact cable is sold to any licensed operator at rates published by the host's regulator, on the model of the open-access wholesale rules that broke the monopolies on Europe's fibre. A cable that is open is a cable no single owner can use to squeeze a country.

1. The Fund's share. The Fund of № 001 takes a minority stake in each cable company, under the Marshall Compact exception to the Index Rule, and collects the dividend; a submarine cable is a toll road with a fifty-year life, and toll roads pay. The stake comes with a seat, which is the Compact's guarantee that items 2 and 3 are honoured after the ribbon is cut.

1. The people. The Builder Corps of № 110 places network engineers at each landing station for the first two years, each training two local engineers to run it. A station whose operators must call Shenzhen for maintenance is a station Shenzhen controls.

1. The map, published. Every cable, its owners, its landing stations and their operators, on one public map, updated annually, so that a government deciding whose offer to accept can see who owns what already.

The numbers

The cost of a cable. A transoceanic cable costs on the order of $300 million to $1 billion; a regional African system, less. The next decade's African cables and terrestrial backhaul are on the order of $10 billion in total, of which the Compact would guarantee perhaps half.

The return. Cable capacity is sold for decades; consortium members earn on their investment at rates that have drawn Meta and Google to spend billions on their own. The Fund's minority stake is an investment, not a cost, and the guarantee's expected loss is a few percent.

The traffic. African internet users will roughly double in the next decade, to well over a billion, and the data centres, the Tongue Commons of № 115 and the grid of № 111 all ride on the cables.

The comparison. The United States has spent on the order of $100 million on cable security through the programmes that block Chinese-built cables from its own shores. It has spent almost nothing offering the alternative to the countries where the map is still open.

The honest objections

"Meta and Google are already building Africa's cables; the market does not need the government." They are building the trunk lines that serve their own traffic, and 2Africa's consortium includes China Mobile because the market does not ask who owns the landing station. The Compact adds the conditions the market does not: open access, host ownership of the shore, and a share for the public. The private capital is welcome; the terms are the point.

"A rule against Chinese contractors is protectionism dressed as security." It is security, and the United States applies the same rule to its own shores without apology. The Compact does not bar Chinese firms from buying capacity, which they will. It bars a foreign state from holding the building where a nation's connection to the world comes ashore, which is a rule any sovereign would want and few have been offered the means to enforce.

"African governments will accept the cheaper Chinese offer anyway." Some will, and the map in item 6 will show it. The Compact's bet, like № 111's, is that governments that have watched the terms of a decade of Chinese infrastructure are looking for a second offer with different terms, and that the second offer has not been made because nobody made it.

"The Fund holding a stake in a telecom is the state capitalism № 065 warned against." The Index Rule's exception for the Marshall Compact exists for exactly this: a minority stake, held for a dividend and a seat, in an asset the Fund helped finance, with the operation in the host's hands. The Fund does not run the cable. It collects the toll and reads the board minutes, which is what the guarantee bought.

"Landing stations can be tapped by anyone, including America." They can, and the Compact's honest answer is that host ownership, open access and local operators are the conditions under which the host, not any foreign power, decides who does. A country that owns its landing station can refuse the United States too. That is what ownership means.

Sources

• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Beneath the Waves: Addressing Vulnerabilities in Africa's Undersea Digital Infrastructure (2025)
• 2Africa consortium, cable specifications, landing points and members, 2africacable.net; Google, Equiano cable announcements and landing stations
• TeleGeography, Submarine Cable Map and market reports, on cable counts, costs and the wet-plant suppliers
• U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, The Global Submarine Cable Network, Cybersecurity and Resilience (2024)
• Oxford University, "What does Meta's undersea cable plan mean for geopolitics?" (2025)
• Proposals № 001 (The American Dividend); № 006 (The Marshall Compact); № 065 (The Index Rule); № 109 (The Embassy Ledger); № 110 (The Builder Corps); № 111 (The Six Hundred Million); № 115 (The Tongue Commons, forthcoming)