Candle Alliance Sparks a New Era of Asia Pacific Bandwidth Growth

Meta, SoftBank and Telekom Malaysia advance the 570 Tbps Candle cable as cloud and AI demand accelerates

2 Dec 2025

A new subsea cable backed by Meta, SoftBank and Telekom Malaysia is set to add significant capacity to Asia-Pacific’s digital infrastructure, as rising cloud and AI workloads place pressure on existing routes.

The system, known as Candle, was unveiled in late September and has become one of the most closely watched projects in the international bandwidth market. It is designed to deliver a total capacity of 570 terabits per second and will run almost 8,000km between Japan and Singapore. The twenty-four-fiber-pair design gives it far greater scale than earlier systems at a time when data traffic from video, cloud services and compute-heavy applications continues to rise.

For Meta, the cable is intended to support demand from users and developers seeking lower latency and more space to expand digital services. SoftBank views the project as strategically important for Japan as the country tries to maintain its position in regional data flows. Telekom Malaysia expects the route to reinforce Malaysia’s ambitions as a digital hub, helped by a rapid increase in data centre construction.

Candle also reflects a broader shift in the subsea sector. Large-scale builds were once dominated by telecoms carriers, but global technology groups now sponsor many of the newest routes. Analysts say the change is shaping project economics, system design and construction timetables, with companies hoping that newer links will provide more reliable access to cloud services across borders.

Regulatory scrutiny and multi-country coordination remain ahead for the consortium, and regional carriers continue to seek clarity on how access will be allocated. But confidence in the project is supported by the partners’ investment record and by strong regional demand for additional capacity.

As construction progresses, Candle is expected to influence data movement between some of Asia’s busiest digital hubs and signal a new phase of collaboration between platform companies and telecoms operators in the region’s network build-out.