The Strait of Hormuz has become widely known as a critical oil transit route since the US-Israeli war on Iran led to the closing of the strait.
But it is also a major pathway for global digital infrastructure. Subsea fibre-optic cables running through or near the strait carry much of the internet traffic linking Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
Last week, Iran warned submarine cables in the Hormuz were a vulnerable point for the region’s digital economy, raising concerns about potential attacks on critical infrastructure.
In recent years, Gulf countries, including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, have been investing heavily in artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure as part of efforts to diversify their economies away from oil.
Those ambitions depend heavily on subsea cables, the backbone of global data transmission.
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What are subsea cables and why are they so important?
Subsea cables are fibre-optic or electrical cables laid on the sea floor to transmit data and power. They carry around 99 percent of the world’s internet traffic, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations specialised agency for digital technologies.
They also carry telecommunications and electricity between countries, and are essential for cloud services and online communications.
Academic work on global internet infrastructure similarly describes subsea cables as the core physical layer of the modern internet, with satellites playing only a niche role due to limited capacity.
Damage to these cables can lead to slower internet speeds, outages, and disruption to economic activity, according to industry experts.
“Damaged cables mean the internet slowing down or outages, e-commerce disruptions, delayed financial transactions … and economic fallout from all of these disruptions,” geopolitical and energy analyst Masha Kotkin was quoted as saying by Reuters.
Gulf countries, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia, have been investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure to diversify their economies away from oil. Both nations have established national AI companies serving customers across the region — all reliant on undersea cables to move data at lightning speed.
Multiple independent datasets and telecom maps show that the waters around the Strait of Hormuz host a cluster of major international cable systems, including, Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1), connecting Southeast Asia to Europe via Egypt, with landing points in the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia; the FALCON network, connecting India and Sri Lanka to Gulf countries, Sudan, and Egypt and the Gulf Bridge International Cable System, linking all Gulf countries including Iran. Additional networks are under construction, including a system led by Qatar’s Ooredoo.
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TeleGeography, which maintains the most widely used global submarine cable database, identifies multiple active systems passing through the Gulf corridor that converge near Hormuz before branching to landing stations in the UAE, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.
Gulf AI and cloud systems depend on these links.
National and regional AI initiatives in the Gulf, including large-scale programmes involving the UAE and Saudi Arabia, are being developed alongside hyperscale cloud and data centre infrastructure that depends on continuous cross-border data flows carried primarily through subsea fibre-optic cables.