// ARS TECHNICA — MONDO
China’s snooping around Pacific undersea cables raises risks for Big Tech
US-owned trans-Pacific cables face growing risks from sabotage and China.
Subsea cable projects owned by US companies such as Google and Meta face some of the greatest risks from the threat of deep-sea sabotage in the Pacific Ocean, according to a new report. That coincides with Chinese research ships spending an extraordinary amount of time apparently surveying undersea cables—not to mention Chinese commercial ships being investigated for cutting cables in both European and Asian waters.
Most damage to the undersea cables that form the Internet’s backbone is the result of accidents involving bottom-trawling fishing nets and ship anchors dragging on the seabed, with storms and undersea landslides also factoring in. But the recent rise in international tensions and open conflicts have placed new scrutiny on more suspicious instances of cable-cutting damage, with analysts warning about Russia and China in particular engaging in cable sabotage or tampering as “gray zone” tactics that fall short of direct military confrontation.
One of the newest risk assessments of China’s gray zone tactics targeting the Internet’s undersea infrastructure comes from a research report published by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an independent government commission that advises Congress. The report was contracted to the London-based think tank China Strategic Risks Institute and published in September 2026.
The report authors created an interactive Trans-Pacific Cable Gray Zone Vulnerability Index that ranks the undersea cables considered most at risk and displays a map of their routes spanning the Pacific Ocean. Such an index could help identify which cables should get highest priority in terms of placing underwater sensors or setting up patrols to monitor for threats.
Risk factors used in the vulnerability index include the undersea depth of the cable routes, nearby shipping traffic, cable ownership, China’s exclusive economic zone and broader territorial claims, and whether each cable connects to Taiwan. Taiwan is considered a geopolitical hotspot as a self-governing island democracy that is also claimed by China, with the latter ramping up military maneuvers involving warships and aircraft around Taiwan in recent years.
The index suggests that the risk to cables is highest around Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines, partly because of China’s claim of sovereignty over Taiwan but also because subsea cables linking the region to the United States must pass through shallow water with busy shipping lanes.
Among the 10 trans-Pacific cables identified as being most at risk, several are still under development with significant ownership stakes from US companies. These include the TPU project owned by Google, the ORCA cable owned by Meta, and the E2A cable co-owned by Verizon along with firms in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. All three of these projects had risk scores in the top five.
The report authors warn that any serious disruption to a single trans-Pacific cable could “risk overwhelming current available capacity on direct routings between the United States, Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines, forcing data onto slower, less direct routes.”
An even greater disruption involving multiple cables, potentially during a geopolitical crisis involving Taiwan, could “significantly reduce headroom and even overwhelm trans-Pacific capacity as a whole,” with communications between the United States and Indo-Pacific region having to reroute through other cables across the globe. That could have major economic consequences for Internet communications, cloud services and financial trading.