More than 90% of the cable capacity that links Europe and Asia runs through cables in the Red Sea, by the reckoning of TeleGeography, a US telecoms research firm, and Malaysia sits at the far end of those routes. The pinch point is the Bab al-Mandab strait, less than 32 kilometres wide between Yemen and the Horn of Africa. The figure describes capacity built into the cables, not a live measure of how much traffic flows where.
Fighting around Yemen has turned that geography into a live problem. The Houthis, a group the United States has designated a terrorist organisation, seized the Yemeni side of the strait in September. Saudi-backed government forces said in early October that they had retaken key positions, a claim the Houthis denied, so the area remains contested. The world's biggest technology companies are already moving to secure backup routes around it, in some cases at steep prices, according to a report by Rest of World.
Citing people familiar with the deals, that report said Google had bought backup fibre capacity along land routes through Turkey. Microsoft, in a statement of its own, said it would invest more than 400 million US dollars in subsea and land links across the Middle East by 2030. Google and Meta have also begun shifting some traffic onto a land route across Iraq they had previously kept in reserve, the report said, though neither company responded to its questions.
The reason for the scramble is that there is no easy detour. A cut in contested water can leave a link down for months, even when the physical repair would take only one to two weeks, because vessels need permits and safety guarantees before crews can go in. Switching to another sea cable does not help, because almost all of them pass through the same gap. "You can have capacity on multiple cables, but if they are all routed through the same tight expanse of water, suddenly your route resilience is not looking so resilient," Paul Brodsky of TeleGeography told Rest of World. It is not hypothetical: three Red Sea cables were damaged in 2024, Rest of World reported, and those repairs dragged on for months while crews waited for clearance.
For Malaysia, this is not a distant story, because its cable routes to Europe run through the same corridor. The industry database Submarine Networks lists Malaysia as connected to 23 submarine cable systems across 15 landing stations. The active systems that reach Europe, among them SEA-ME-WE 4 and SEA-ME-WE 5, run through the Red Sea, with the newer SEA-ME-WE 6 due to follow. Telekom Malaysia says its SEA-ME-WE 6 system will land at a new station in Morib and reach France by way of Djibouti, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the Red Sea corridor. Traffic can be redirected through other cables and land links, but the direct cable routes to Europe run under that strait.
The stakes are higher because of where Malaysia is placing its bets. On property consultancy Knight Frank's count, Johor ranks third in Asia Pacific for live data centre capacity, at 1,110 megawatts, and first for its incoming project pipeline, at 8,542 megawatts, a build-out that leans on fast, reliable links to the rest of the world. And most of Malaysia's internet users reach the web by phone, on apps and services whose servers can sit continents away.
The scale of the dependence is easy to underestimate. Four American technology giants, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, account for about three quarters of the world's international internet bandwidth, by TeleGeography's count. Rest of World reported that Iranian drones hit Amazon data centre sites in the United Arab Emirates and near its Bahrain facility in March, and that around the same time some banking and payment apps in the region went down.
For now the sea routes are still cheaper and still the default, and analysts quoted by Rest of World expect the land alternatives to stay mostly in reserve until a cable actually breaks. Until then, Malaysia's cables to Europe keep running under the Red Sea, through a strait less than 32 kilometres wide.
Image(s) courtesy of Albert Stoynov and Winston Chen on Unsplash.
