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.
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.
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.
Subsea cables enable movement of large datasets, access to global cloud infrastructure, and regional delivery of AI-powered services.
What are the risks?
While the total length of submarine cables has grown considerably between 2014 and 2025, faults have remained stable at around 150–200 incidents per year, according to the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC). State-sponsored sabotage remains a risk, but 70–80 percent of faults are caused by accidental human activities — primarily fishing and ship anchors, according to the ICPC and experts.
Other risks include undersea currents, earthquakes, subsea volcanoes and typhoons, said Alan Mauldin, research director at telecom research firm TeleGeography. The industry addresses these by burying cables, armouring them and selecting safe routes, he said.
The Iran war, nearing the two-month mark, has brought unprecedented disruption to global energy supply and regional infrastructure, including hits to Amazon Web Services data centres in Bahrain and the UAE. Subsea cables have been spared so far.
However, an indirect risk exists from damaged vessels inadvertently hitting cables by dragging anchors.
"In a situation of active military operations, the risk of unintentional damage increases, and the longer this conflict lasts, the higher the likelihood of unintentional damage," Kotkin said.
A similar incident occurred in 2024, when a commercial vessel attacked by Houthis drifted in the Red Sea and severed cables with its anchor.
The degree to which damage to the cables might impact connectivity in Gulf countries depends largely on how much individual network operators rely on them and what alternatives they have, according to TeleGeography.
Limited alternatives, not an easy fix
Repairing damaged cables in conflict zones poses a separate challenge to securing them. While the physical repair itself is not overly complicated, decisions by repair vessel owners and insurers may also be impacted by the risk of damage from fighting or the presence of mines, experts say.
Permits to access territorial waters add another layer of difficulty. "Often one of the biggest problems with doing repairs is you have to get permits into the waters where the damage is. That can take a long time sometimes and can be the biggest source (of problems)," Mauldin said.
Once the conflict ends, industry players will also face the challenge of re-surveying the sea floor to determine safe cable positions and avoid ships or objects that may have sunk during hostilities, he said.
While potential damage to subsea cables would not cause a complete connectivity loss — due to land-based links — experts agree that satellite systems are not a feasible replacement, as they cannot handle the same volume of traffic and are more expensive.
"It's not as though you could just switch to satellite. That's not an alternative," Mauldin said, noting that satellites rely on connections to land-based networks and are better suited for things in motion, like airplanes and ships.
Low-Earth-orbit networks such as Starlink are "a boutique solution, which is not scalable to millions of users, at this time," Kotkin added.
