Conflict in the Red Sea forcing cloud giants to find new routes for the internet

Fighting around the Bab al-Mandab strait is forcing major cloud providers to buy expensive land routes and invest in new links after most undersea cables between Europe and Asia were left vulnerable. More than 90% of capacity runs through that narrow gap, and when the Houthis seized Yemen’s side and the island of Mayyun in September, companies scrambled for alternatives. Google purchased fiber strands alongside Turkish state pipelines at two to three times the rough €6 million benchmark for recent Turkish crossings; Microsoft pledged over $400 million for subsea and land links in the Middle East by 2030; Iraq contracted Ooredoo to build an underground route from Al-Faw to Europe. Google and Meta have already started routing some live traffic through an Iraq land path they had previously kept in reserve.

The urgency reflects hard infrastructure realities: a single cable cut in the strait can take months to repair because ships and crews require security guarantees to work in contested waters, as happened after 2024 damage that took months to fix. Cloud firms supply roughly three-quarters of international bandwidth, so outages cascade into regional banking and software failures - confirmed after drone strikes hit Amazon facilities in March. Land routes are costlier and slower to scale, so most traffic remains undersea, but providers are testing and provisioning backups while increasingly pricing in a long-term loss of stable Yemeni control.