The cables of power: Europe's digital future is being decided on the seabed

What it’s about

When Europeans think of digital sovereignty, they think of cloud, perhaps chips, perhaps AI models. Almost no-one thinks of cables on the seabed. Yet that is where 90 percent of transatlantic data traffic runs – and the lines are increasingly financed, built or controlled by Amazon, Google and Meta. Germany’s Monopolies Commission has, for the first time, warned of a structural dependency on the seabed. It is a blind spot that is becoming dangerous.

The wake-up call in the Baltic

On the floor of the Baltic Sea sits “Cinia C-Lion 1”, a data motorway between Helsinki and Rostock since 2016. More than 1,000 kilometres long, embedded in a trench cut into the seabed. In November 2024 it was severed. Shortly afterwards a second line failed: the connection between Gotland and Lithuania. The data flowed could be rerouted. But the security-policy question remains: what if it was sabotage?

Why the dependency is a problem

“The EU has not followed this topic with the attention it deserves for a long time,” says Tomaso Duso, chair of Germany’s Monopolies Commission. The new report traces how few players now dominate the cable infrastructure. Where telcos used to invest in cables as consortia, today it is the US hyperscalers building their own connections, because they need them for their cloud strategies. Europe can co-finance – or watch.

What needs to happen now

Duso and his commission call for a European strategy: more redundancy, more own investment, clear security standards for cable operators. NATO has launched a surveillance mission in the Baltic; Germany contributes a frigate. But structural dependency cannot be solved by surveillance alone. Only Europe’s own infrastructure can resolve it – and that takes years.

I reported this together with Josefine Fokuhl for Handelsblatt. This is a first impression.