We have posted submarine cables owned by content material suppliers for practically a decade. Once we first revealed this record in 2017, we had 20 cables listed. Quick-forward to in the present day, and our record has grown to over 60—a large markup.
Few telecommunications trade traits have been as impactful previously decade because the rise of content material suppliers because the dominant customers of worldwide capability.
As you would possibly recall, content material suppliers’ urge for food for bandwidth ballooned within the early 2010s. In response, a few of these community operators transitioned from simply being prospects of wholesale capability to proudly owning transport community infrastructure. This pattern started when Google turned an investor within the Unity cable consortium, which entered service in 2010.
Since then Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, have additionally invested in new submarine cable programs both straight or as main pre-sale purchasers.
The desk under lists content material suppliers’ publicly disclosed cable investments. Past these, content material suppliers have additionally acquired partial or full fiber pairs on different submarine cables. In addition they have leases and IRUs for managed capability on quite a few programs as nicely.
We’ll replace this new record as these suppliers become involved in new cable tasks or as different content material suppliers begin investing in related builds.
Submarine cables owned by content material suppliers
Who’re content material suppliers?
The time period content material supplier refers to a big selection of networks identified by a number of labels together with hyperscalers, OTTs (over-the-top suppliers), ICPs (web content material suppliers), or CSPs (cloud service suppliers). There are a few key segments throughout the distinction of content material suppliers, and a few operators match a couple of phase. These embrace:
- Web-based content material and platform suppliers (e.g. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and TikTok dad or mum firm ByteDance)
- Cloud service/platform suppliers (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Alibaba, and Google)
- Content material Supply Networks (CDNs) (e.g. Akamai, CloudFlare)
For our analysis, we embrace content material suppliers that function their very own long-haul networks as distinct from the general public web backbones run by carriers.
Content material suppliers use essentially the most worldwide bandwidth capability
Our knowledge exhibits that content material suppliers’ worldwide bandwidth progress has outpaced that of all different customers of capability in recent times.
This has been nothing wanting revolutionary in an trade lengthy dominated by conventional web carriers. In 2017, content material suppliers surpassed web spine suppliers as the most important customers of worldwide capability. This edge has grown quickly in subsequent years. Between 2021 and 2025 the quantity of worldwide capability deployed by content material networks greater than tripled, reaching 6.3 Pbps.
International Content material Supplier Bandwidth
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