Cerberus Keeps SubCom Into the Deep

Cerberus closes a massive $2.3 billion deal to retain SubCom, the sole American firm capable of building the world’s undersea fiber-optic backbone

5 May 2026

Cerberus Capital Management has closed a $2.3 billion continuation vehicle for SubCom, extending its ownership of America's only full-service submarine cable company. Announced April 20, 2026 and led by specialist secondary investors, it ranks among the largest transactions ever recorded in the subsea sector.

The numbers tell the story quickly. Cerberus originally paid $325 million for SubCom in 2018. Today's deal values the business at nearly seven times that figure, a return that reflects how dramatically the world's appetite for undersea fiber has grown.

SubCom holds roughly 40 percent of global market share by cable length deployed. It designs, manufactures, and installs complete transoceanic fiber optic systems from its campus in Newington, New Hampshire, with a specialized fleet operating out of Baltimore and Portsmouth. No other American company controls that full value chain, a fact that matters enormously to Washington right now.

Two forces are reshaping demand. Google, Meta, and Amazon have stopped leasing bandwidth and started owning cable infrastructure outright, commissioning bespoke systems engineered to their specific routing and latency requirements. At the same time, AI workloads are pushing intercontinental data flows at volumes existing capacity was never built to handle. SubCom's 2024 order backlog hit $4.7 billion, a record.

Investors are pricing in the strategic premium. The deal closed at a 9x EBITDA multiple, well above the range typical for legacy telecom operators. Bipartisan legislation introduced in early 2026 targeting subsea cable security has only reinforced SubCom's standing as critical national infrastructure. Japan's NEC Corporation, watching the same signals, has committed over $629 million to expand its own subsea operations over the next five years.

The geopolitical calculus is straightforward: the cables crossing ocean floors carry the data that runs the global economy, and controlling who builds them has become a matter of national priority. SubCom is the only American company positioned to answer that call. Cerberus is clearly not finished with it yet.