Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. My name is Guillaume Serries and today I explain to you why the GAFAM weave their web of fiber optics.
Yes, they are tech giants, but they are becoming telco giants. How? ‘Or’ What ? By investing massively in the submarine cables that now surround the seas and oceans of the globe. But why do Microsoft, Alphabet – Google’s parent company – Meta – the former Facebook – and Amazon now carve out veritable kingdoms 20,000 leagues under the sea?
Well, because these cables carry 95% of international internet traffic. And above all, because they connect all the data centers of the world via 1.3 million kilometers of glass threads. Remember these two pieces of information, they will shed light on what follows.
200 terabits per second
This is what causes this great change that has taken place in recent years. Judge instead. Before 2012, these players used less than 10% of the capacity of submarine cables. Today, this proportion is two-thirds.
In short, in less than 10 years, the GAFAMs have become, by far, the main users of the capacity of submarine cables. With a very substantial appetite. Too substantial to be satisfied with being a user of cables which have a capacity of 200 terabits per second, for the most recent.
In 2010, only Google held a stake in the Unity cable, which connects Japan and the United States.
Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon invested over $90 billion in 2020
And according to the specialized firm TeleGeography, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon in the next three years should collectively own more than 30 long-distance submarine cables, connecting all the continents of the globe, with the exception of Antarctica.
Telecommunications companies initially reacted with suspicion to the tech giants’ voracity for their cables. And this concern is quite understandable. Imagine that Amazon owns the routes with which it delivers its packages.
But the cash offered by these giants has also brought down the astronomical full cost of transmitting data across oceans for everyone. Even for their competitors.
The best proof of their voracity is… their cooperation
Together, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon invested more than $90 billion in capital expenditures in 2020 alone. And their action increased international data transmission capacity by… 41% that same year.
The best proof of their voracity is… their cooperation. Because yes, most of the cables financed by the tech giants are collaborations between rivals. The Marea transatlantic cable, for example, which connects the United States and Spain, was completed in 2017 and is partly owned by Microsoft and Facebook.
This sharing of bandwidth between competitors allows each company to have capacity on a greater number of cables. And this redundancy is essential to keep the global internet running when a cable is cut or damaged. And therefore the operation of the public clouds AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
A spine, we take care of it
So, you better understand the interest of tech giants for these cables. They are the backbone of the brains that are now the global data centers of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. And a spine, we take care of it.
Because laying and maintaining submarine cables costs hundreds of millions of dollars per cable. Enough to finance a small fleet of vessels, ranging from surveillance vessels to vessels specializing in cable laying. A high-flying job done in depth.
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