New cable ambitions
The Pan-Arctic Cable took shape when European companies and research organizations joined forces with a Greenlandic telecommunications operator to sign an agreement on developing the project in 2025, according to Submarine Cable Networks.
The project has since received support from the European Union through the Connecting Europe Facility Digital programme. The European Union has already invested $119 million (€107 million) to “promote the secure and sovereign connectivity of Greenland” in addition to funding the Pan-Arctic Cable plan, according to the European Commission’s new policy document on Europe’s Arctic strategy.
But the goal of eventually extending the undersea cable to Japan and South Korea via Canada faces considerable challenges, including the need for more European icebreaking ships to support the installation and maintenance of the cable in the frozen waters of the Arctic. Multiple pan-Arctic projects have been proposed in the past and some are still in development.
An earlier project known as the Arctic Connect undersea cable aimed to connect Europe and Asia using the Northern Sea Route that runs along Russia’s Arctic coast, but was eventually halted in May 2021 before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine led to increasing Russian isolation from Europe.
Still, the Pan-Arctic Cable is not the only undersea cable project that could strengthen Europe’s ties with friendlier nations. In September 2026, Norwegian company Bulk Infrastructure Group AS began searching for a Canadian partner to acquire a majority stake in a new transatlantic cable directly linking Europe to Canada, according to Bloomberg News. The proposed project has been called the Leif Erikson system.
The Internet economy gives way to geopolitics
In previous decades, “geopolitics played virtually no role when companies considered where to run their cables and which countries to connect,” said Braw, whose book Undersea War explores why the world has become more dangerous for the Internet’s undersea backbone. But the focus on maximizing data connectivity and Internet traffic has given way to more complex planning that also takes into account international relations and the growing risk of adversaries conducting cable surveillance or sabotage.
