Asia can’t afford a ‘cloudless’ day. That means paying attention to undersea cables

Kapil Kumar Jain is vice president of global network services at Tata Communications.

Picture a “cloudless” day—not in the meteorological sense, but one in which digital operations come to a sudden, catastrophic halt. Financial transactions stall. AI applications lose access to data. Supply chains slow, and customer experiences suffer.

It may sound improbable, yet recent events suggest otherwise. In 2024, subsea cable damage caused widespread internet outages that disrupted banks, fintech platforms and cloud-based businesses across Africa; in 2025, Red Sea cable cuts severely disrupted access across Asia and the Middle East. Internet traffic was rerouted through longer paths, increasing latency for cloud services and adding costs for businesses reliant on real-time digital operations.

These incidents are a reminder that what we call “the cloud” is neither virtual nor invincible. We often imagine it floating somewhere above us. In reality, it lies at the bottom of the ocean: More than 99% of all international data is carried not by satellites but by a physical backbone of subsea cables.

The regional digital economy runs uninterrupted only because companies made continuous, heavy investment in critical transit hubs like India and Singapore.

AI is placing unprecedented demands on the cloud, the foundation of today’s digital economy. AI workloads and hyperscale data centres need ever-greater bandwidth—with 400 gigabits (gbps) per second now the baseline and 800 gbps already emerging.

As countries and businesses race to scale AI, much........

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