Undersea fibre-optic internet cables have become a major site of platform investment. Until 2010, legacy telecoms firms like AT&T and Verizon accounted for most investment in subsea cables. But platforms like Meta, Google, and Amazon have driven a \$20 bn investment boom in this infrastructure over the past decade. Between 2020 and 2023, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google accounted for approximately 90% of capital expenditure on new transatlantic cables and 70% of that for transpacific cables (Hamilton and Quinlan, 2024, 98). Platform giants today are also the biggest users of subsea bandwidth by far, accounting for nearly three quarters of all traffic (Salgado, 2023). As such, US firms (both platforms and telcos) own (fully or in part) more than 90 cables, and represent the dominant investors in future projects (Dufetre, 2023).
Much of this new cabling infrastructure transmits platforms’ internal data transfer needs (unlike that provided by the telcos operators, which lease capacity to external users). Platforms’ exploding investments in physical infrastructure of the internet are directly related to their efforts to expand digital service offerings such as cloud computing, and cement their dominant competitive position. As Blum and Baraka (2022) write of Google’s investments in cabling: ‘Once the cable is up and running, Google’s network managers can prioritize Google’s own data traffic, ensuring the performance and reliability of their cloud services – while using that reliability as the services’ key selling point.’ To lay infrastructure, platforms typically form consortiums with key cable suppliers such as SubCom (US), ASN (France), and NEC (Japan), who produce and lay physical cabling, and telcos like AT&T which provide expertise in deployment, maintenance, and operations.
State Platform Capitalism
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