As US ties fray, Europe plans first undersea cable link to Greenland

New cable ambitions

The Pan-Arctic Cable took shape when European companies and research organizations joined forces with a Greenland telecom operator to sign an agreement on developing the project in 2025, according to Submarine Cable Networks.

Since that time, the project has received European Union backing through the Connecting Europe Facility Digital program. The European Union has already invested $119 million (107 million euros) to “advance Greenland’s secure and sovereign connectivity” along with funding the Pan-Arctic Cable plan, according to the new European Commission policy document on Europe’s Arctic strategy.

But the goal of eventually extending the undersea cable to Japan and South Korea by way of Canada faces considerable challenges, including requiring more European icebreaker ships to support the installation and maintenance of the cable in icy Arctic waters. Multiple pan-Arctic projects have been proposed in the past and some are still in development.

One earlier project known as the Arctic Connect subsea cable aimed to connect Europe and Asia using the Northern Sea Route running along Russia’s Arctic coastline—but that was eventually halted in May 2021 before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine led to growing Russian isolation from Europe.

Still, the Pan-Arctic Cable is not the only subsea cable project that could strengthen Europe’s ties to friendlier nations. In September 2026, the Norwegian company Bulk Infrastructure Group AS began looking for a Canadian partner to take a majority ownership stake in a new transatlantic cable directly linking Europe to Canada, according to Bloomberg News. That proposed project has been named the Leif Erikson system.

Internet economics gives way to geopolitics

In previous decades, “geopolitics played virtually no role when companies considered where to put their cables and what 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 accounts for international relations and the growing risk of adversaries carrying out surveillance or sabotage of cables.

Source: arstechnica.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.