A proposed pan-Arctic undersea cable is intended to strengthen connectivity between Europe, Greenland and North America, with a possible future extension to Japan and South Korea. The project has received European Union support, but its development faces major technical and geopolitical challenges, including the difficulty of laying and maintaining cables in the ice-covered Arctic Ocean.
New cable ambitions
The pan-Arctic cable project took shape in 2025, when European companies and research institutes joined Greenlandic operators in signing an agreement to develop it. According to the submarine cable network, the project has since received support from the European Union through the Connecting Europe Facility Digital program.
In a new policy paper on Europe’s Arctic Strategy, the European Commission said the European Union has already invested $119 million (€107 million) to “promote the secure and sovereign connectivity of Greenland,” including funding for a pan-Arctic cable project.
The longer-term goal of extending the cable to Japan and South Korea via Canada faces considerable challenges. Among them is the need for more European icebreakers capable of helping to lay and maintain cables in the icy Arctic Ocean. Several pan-Arctic cable projects have been proposed in the past, and some remain under development.
One earlier proposal was the Arctic Connect Submarine Cable. It would have connected Europe and Asia along the Northern Sea Route, which follows Russia’s Arctic coastline. The project was ultimately canceled in May 2021, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine further deepened its isolation from Europe.
The pan-Arctic cable is not the only undersea cable project that could strengthen Europe’s connections with friendly countries. Bloomberg reported that Norwegian company Bulk Infrastructure Group AS began searching in September 2026 for a Canadian partner to take majority ownership of a proposed transatlantic cable directly linking Europe and Canada. The proposed project is called the Leif Erikson system.
Internet economics gives way to geopolitics
For several decades, “geopolitics played virtually no role in how companies considered where to install their cables and which countries to connect to,” Blau wrote in his book Undersea War, which examines why the internet’s undersea backbone is becoming more vulnerable.
That focus on maximizing data connections and internet traffic is now giving way to more complex planning. Cable developers must increasingly consider international relations, along with the growing risk that adversaries could monitor or sabotage critical undersea infrastructure.
Source: arstechnica.com
