Cloud Giants Are Buying the Atlantic

AWS unveiled Fastnet, its first solo-owned trans-Atlantic submarine cable, linking Maryland to Ireland and targeting 2028 operations

22 Jun 2026

Somewhere beneath the North Atlantic, the old arrangement is coming undone. For decades, cloud giants shared undersea cable capacity through consortium deals, splitting bandwidth and governance with telecoms and rivals alike. Amazon Web Services has decided it prefers solitude.

Fastnet, the company's first independently owned trans-Atlantic submarine cable, will link Maryland to Ireland and is expected to carry traffic by 2028. The cable is designed specifically for cloud and artificial intelligence workloads, not for the general internet traffic that consortium cables were built to serve. Sole ownership gives AWS full authority over routing, security, and upgrade timelines, none of which shared arrangements readily permit.

The economics help explain the timing. Enterprise adoption of generative AI tools has driven sharp growth in demand for low-latency, high-throughput Atlantic connections, and that pressure has yet to plateau. Leasing a portion of a shared cable introduces constraints that owned infrastructure does not. S&P Global noted in May 2026 that Fastnet "reflects a broader hyperscaler shift toward capacity-dense and security-aware infrastructure as AI workloads expand."

Ciena, which supplies optical networking technology, is well placed to benefit as capital flows toward privately owned undersea systems. Analysts at NextFinancial have flagged subsea cable infrastructure as a fast-growing spending priority, with hyperscaler investment reshaping a market long controlled by telecom consortia. The shift is structural, not cyclical.

Proprietary submarine cables create strategic advantages that competitors cannot quickly replicate, and the financial rationale strengthens as AI inference traffic multiplies across the Atlantic. For enterprises depending on cloud platforms, faster and more dependable transatlantic connectivity is the near-term consequence. The deeper consequence is less visible: control over the physical layer of the internet is concentrating in fewer, larger hands, and those hands belong to the cloud providers rather than the carriers who once held them.