Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Stocks of publicly traded companies including Coreweave, META, Microsoft, and Oracle have lost 4% to 39% of their stock market value over the last year. Coreweave's core business is building data centers stocked with GPUs to rent AI service providers for estimation and inference. Obviously, this makes the standard data center look downright capital light. Racks must be populated with servers and GPUs and capable of handling 120Kw power loads. So power infrastructure and backup alone cost many multiples more on a per square meter basis than the standard telecom hotel. Moreover, these data centers must be bigger because a large language model might have trillions of parameters to be estimated. Coreweave's massive debt loads have led to a 37% decline in its market value over the last twelve months.  Secondly, customer switching costs are very low in the AI data center market. AI service providers are software companies. They download their data into the bare metal ...

NTT and Mitsui Leasing have teamed up together with fibre optic cable manufacturer Sumitomo Corporation to fund a 16 fibre pair subsea cable costing $500 million. Design capacity is 320 Tbps. This is the second project on which NTT Data and Mitsui Leasing have cooperated. The high capacity 20 fibre pair Juno cable was the first project. It is unusual to see a large incumbent player like NTT undertaking a subsea cable project with a non-telecom company as co-owner. But the advantages are clear. Mitsui will contribute cash, but not play a major role in design, vendor selection or wholesale commercials. So it not only reduces NTT's risk by sharing funding requirements, but it gives NTT a free hand in decision making. One lesson that has become perfectly clear is that large carrier consortiums increase the likelihood of deployment delays and lengthen the entire planning cycle because decisions require consensus. Moreover, the consensus requirement makes it difficult for new approaches...

MRC: $32.5K. A point: Most Mumbai DCs. Z point: SG3.  Cable: IAX.

The well respected wide area network carrier has lit a new, shorter path connecting Milano and Paris data centers. While I believe you should never limit yourself to one vendor, EUNetworks is a very safe choice because it does the fundamentals well and is commercially flexible. The new route spans 1057 kilometers. EU did not provide a latency estimate, but it takes roughly 5.1 microseconds to traverse a kilometer. So multiply by 1057*2 and the RTD is approximately 10 ms. One diversity edge is that the route avoids Lyon. I recommend network planners consider to further diversity their network portfolio and reduce risk as a financail analysts might say. 

A consortium consisting of TATA Communications, Lightstorm, Microsoft, and Singtel just announced a new 16 fibre pair subsea network tailored to serve the AI data center markets in Hyderabad, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. It includes two Indian landings, one in Southern Chennai and another at Machilipatnum, the latter being the shortest path to Hyderabad. Both Hyderabad and Lumpur host large numbers of data centers equipped with GPUs for rent to estimate AI large language models. Conversely, Singapore is a distribution point for estimated AI models. What is sometimes called AI inference. Both space and power in the city state are too limited and expensive for AI model estimation. Besides the Singapore and Indian landings, there will likely be a cable branch landing in the Malaysian province of Selangor, chosen because it is the shortest way to reach Kuala Lumpur. Public information on the new system is sparse, but it is also likely that cable will include be extended to Hyderabad and Ch...

Bypass the Red Sea and Persian Gulf quagmires as well as China and Chinese equipment. No Russian paper. Save at least 40 to 60 milliseconds over subsea routes via the Indian ocean.