Speakers:
- Julian Rawle, principal – Cambridge Management Consulting
- Eduardo Mateo, chief strategy officer, Submarine Network Division – NEC
- Marvin Tan, senior research analyst – TELEGEOGRAPHY
- Budi Satria Dharma Purba, CEO – TELIN
- Matthew Goh, director APAC infrastructure – KKR
As demand for high-capacity and low-latency networks soars in the region, subsea cables remain critical in driving capacity usage.
With major investments from hyperscalers and governments, Asia is currently witnessing rapid development in subsea cable infrastructure, enabling 5G, AI, and cloud growth.
Taking place at ITW Asia 2025 and moderated by Julian Rawle, a principal at Cambridge Management Consulting, this panel considered how the landscape of subsea cables and technological innovations is evolving, in addition to how big tech is taking an important role in shaping the future of digital connectivity.
Supplier constraints
The submarine cable industry faces an acute capacity shortage despite concerns about overbuilding, with delivery timelines stretching to six years and manufacturing backlogs reaching 150,000 kilometres, according to the panel.
Budi Satria Dharma Purba, CEO of TELIN, painted a stark picture of current supply constraints on critical routes.
“The only cable available now is Peace – SEA-ME-WE 5 is already gone, SEA-ME-WE 6 already gone,” he said. “SEA-ME-WE 6 faces further delays due to the Red Sea situation. The capacity crunch extends beyond Asia-Europe routes … we see that even from the internet traffic and everything, it’s going significantly up, even if we haven’t captured that demand yet.”
There is also a growing mismatch between 15-20-year fibre lifecycles and AI infrastructure that refreshes every 18-24 months, the executives shared. Not adapting to this discrepancy can create risks.
However, Purba noted concrete AI-driven demand emerging.
“We’re starting to see a lot of demand now asking for capacity, and it’s not in the terabit basis – it’s multiple petabit basis,” he added. “The requirement is real now that we are deploying for our customers. he said, adding that hyperscalers’ expansion plans signal significant upcoming demand.
“The demand is there, even if we haven’t anticipated it all yet, because we cannot really gauge how big the AI demand will be. We see how many cables are already planned by Google in the next three to five years, by Meta and then AWS and Microsoft. That’s the real situation that we are facing now.”
How to fix critical bottlenecks
The panel conversation also included the true scale of supplier constraints currently facing carriers, explaining that suppliers can refuse to respond to RFPs unless customers commit to direct appointments. According to the executives, approximately 100 new cable systems competing for limited manufacturing capacity.
“I think in the past few years, our experience has been we always regret why we invested so small on the cable, because the capacity is not enough,” Purba said. “It takes four to five years to build, but maybe in one or two years the capacity is already gone.”
Eduardo Mateo, chief strategy officer at NEC’s Submarine Network Division, identified permitting and vessel availability as critical bottlenecks beyond manufacturing.
“The big bottlenecks now in delivery of systems remain permitting and surveys, which create big delays and prevent us from having streamlined production,” he explained. “Sometimes we have to stop projects because there is no permit. We don’t have space for storage of a lot of cable.”
He added: “If we need more projects, we need more people. We need more project managers. We need more engineers. We need more expertise in the market, and that is not easy to acquire and train in a timely manner.”
Taking steps to accelerate build in Asia
On the technology front, Mateo pushed back against the notion that lower fibre pair counts would ease manufacturing pressure.
“Maybe I disagree a little bit with Pak Budi there. Going low in fibre pair counts will help—actually, it’s the opposite,” he said, explaining that capacity depends on fibre pairs, not cable length.
Matthew Goh, director of APAC infrastructure at KKR, emphasised how changing network architectures are driving demand.
“There’s the obvious data consumption increase and cross-country data transmission. Everyone is talking about AI. Previously, architectures were one data centre and now even three or four data centres within a validity zone,” he explained.
“Every country or every network needs more redundancy,” he said, pointing to recent Middle East cable cuts. “I think every country, or every nation, needs to start thinking a bit more about country resilience and security regarding subsea cables.”
The impact of AI in the subsea industry
Regarding the impact of AI on the subsea industry, the opinions of the panel were cautiously optimistic.
Mateo described the industry consensus: “You get three typical answers. The first one is, ‘I have no idea, and if anybody says they have any idea, they are lying.’ The second answer is, ‘well, it’s too early to say’ – and the third one, which is probably the most accurate, is ‘It depends.’”
It depends on to what extent training data centres needs to move away from people and get closer to energy and water sources, in addition to government regulation and data regulations, Mateo added.
“Are governments really going to allow data to flow internationally to train models? It will depend on how often these big models that will be developed in large training centres will need to push out to inference in other countries. Those alternatives will drive what the demand will be.”
What’s clear is that the industry faces a perfect storm of surging demand, manufacturing constraints, permitting delays, vessel shortages and workforce limitations. The panel makes clear that the subsea industry must navigate all of this whilst also tackling uncertain AI requirements and five-to-six-year deployment cycles.
