Middle East crisis: Strait of Hormuz tensions add risks for subsea cables critical to India’s data flows

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The Strait of Hormuz, a critical global shipping route, is also emerging as a vulnerable corridor for undersea internet cables as tensions in West Asia escalate.The passage controls about a third of India’s westward internet traffic, and experts say this capacity cannot be easily rerouted because alternate routes have limited supply.

The deteriorating security situation has also disrupted ongoing cable repair operations in the region. Ships working there since September 2025 have been forced to halt repairs because of security risks.Subsea cables including Airtel’s SEA-ME-WE 4 (SMW4) and I-ME-WE (IMEWE) systems and Flag Telecom’s FALCON cables were cut near Jeddah in Saudi Arabia last September. Repair work on these systems has now been paused, according to people familiar with the matter.“Repair operations are cumbersome, expensive, and can take several months,” said an executive directly involved in the developments, as quoted by ET.“The last cuts had disrupted roughly 17% of Asia-Gulf internet traffic and rerouting that capacity has been a challenge. In fact, the Strait of Hormuz was being perceived as a safe alternative to the Red Sea to build redundancies. But now with the US-Iran conflict, we expect further delays and heightened costs.”The region has also seen heavy investments in new cable infrastructure in recent years.“Several sovereign and private players have committed billions of capital in constructing new cables in the Gulf seas and the region is expected to see near doubling of capacity in the coming years,” said Amajit Gupta, group CEO and MD at Lightstorm, a network infrastructure company which owns and operates 21,000 km of subsea cables.Several new subsea cable projects are currently being built along this corridor, including Reliance Jio’s India-Europe-Express and India-Asia-Express and Google’s Dhivaru.“In fact, with the turbulence in the Red Sea last year, several companies were considering sovereign land routes through West Asia for laying cables as opposed to the sea,” said Gupta. “It was a faster and safer route transiting through peaceful territories. Clearly, that narrative has now been challenged with the current conflict.”The route was earlier seen as a safer and faster alternative to the Red Sea but is now emerging as another geopolitical flashpoint.“We do not have any submarine cable passing through the Strait of Hormuz,” an Airtel spokesperson said in response to ET’s email queries. Jio and Flag did not respond to queries.Industry executives said prolonged disruption could also affect India’s ambition to build a $270 billion data centre ecosystem and become a hub for cloud services exports.Meta Platforms has selected Mumbai and Visakhapatnam as landing sites for the India leg of its multibillion-dollar undersea cable project, Waterworth. Google is also expected to land its Blue-Raman subsea cable on Indian shores connecting West Asia, Europe and Asia.During a recent visit to New Delhi, Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai unveiled the India-America Connect initiative to create new subsea cable routes.Meanwhile, data centre infrastructure in the region is also facing security risks. On Wednesday, Amazon Web Services said three of its facilities—two in the UAE and one in Bahrain—were attacked by drones, disrupting services in West Asia.“Assets perceived as foreign can become high-visibility targets amid evolving geopolitical tensions,” said Sudhir Kunder, chief business officer, DE-CIX India, a networking infrastructure company, as quoted by ET.