How the Gulf is Fighting for AI Supremacy on the Ocean Floor

This piece builds on our earlier essay, “Saudi Data Embassies and the New Geopolitics of Compute”, which explored how nations like Saudi Arabia are reimagining sovereignty in the age of AI. If that story traced the rise of “data embassies” i.e. sovereign zones for computation, this one follows the physical arteries that make that sovereignty possible: undersea cables.

On a warm September night in the Red Sea, near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, a narrow choke point connecting Asia, Africa, and Europe, a ship’s anchor drifts where it shouldn’t.

Far below, nearly a mile down on the seafloor, the anchor’s chain snags a slender fibre-optic cable. In an instant, a strand of the global internet snaps.

The impact is immediate. Across the Middle East, India, and Africa, connectivity suddenly slows to a crawl. Microsoft’s Azure cloud reports significantly degraded service. Cloudflare reports delays of up to 30% between India and Europe. Gulf telecom operators scramble to reroute traffic as users from Karachi to Abu Dhabi experience sluggish internet for days.

You’d be forgiven for mistaking the “cloud” powering our digital lives as an ethereal, boundless web of connectivity, but occasional events like this serve as a thudding reminder that it depends on a physical, fragile network of undersea cables.

These submarine cables, stretching over 1.5 million kilometres, carry 95–99% of all international internet traffic, including the data that fuels today’s artificial intelligence models and cloud services.

And yet, as critical as they are, these cables are alarmingly vulnerable – prone to accidental damage, natural disasters, and even sabotage by state or non-state actors. The International Cable Protection Committee (yes, really) reports between 100 and 200 such incidents every year.

In recent months, that fragility has pushed Gulf states to rethink geography itself. According to reporting last week, Saudi Arabia and Syria are now in advanced talks to construct new data cables connecting the kingdom to Europe, a project dubbed SilkLink, that would bypass the Red Sea entirely.

For Riyadh, it’s another step toward its goal of becoming a global AI hub; for Damascus, a potential economic lifeline after years of war.

Syria’s Minister of Telecommunications, Abdulsalam Haykal, said the project, worth up to $500 million, could be awarded this month. STC is among the shortlisted bidders, alongside consortiums backed by Jordanian, Kuwaiti, Omani, and Emirati firms.

Routing through Syria and Jordan would not only reduce latency but also provide an alternative to linking through Israel, a route Riyadh still avoids given the lack of formal relations.

“We have access to the Mediterranean and can be a gateway for many countries like Saudi Arabia and others in the Gulf to provide the diversity that hyperscalers need,” Haykal told Semafor.

For Saudi Arabia, the logic is familiar. Just as it once diversified its oil export routes, it’s now diversifying the arteries of data. After all, deals with Nvidia, Qualcomm, Groq, and Amazon Web Services are only as effective as the cables that connect its compute clusters to the world.

The SilkLink corridor can be thought of as both a hedge against the Red Sea’s instability and simultaneously a statement of digital intent: the kingdom is not content to just be a consumer of bandwidth, but an owner of it.

A decade ago, telecom consortia, often state-backed, owned the fibre running through their territorial waters. That model has since flipped.

The world’s largest technology companies – Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta – now represent about 50% of the subsea cable market and account for approximately 66% of the world's undersea fiber-optic capacity usage, up from less than 10% a decade ago. They are building private networks that connect their own data centres directly, bypassing traditional carriers.

Take for example, Google’s Blue-Raman project, linking India to Europe via Israel…

This is premium content. Subscribe to read the full story.