Inside the Cable Project Powering Asia-Pacific’s Digital Future

A powerful consortium launches a next-generation subsea cable to future-proof Asia-Pacific connectivity as data demand surges

13 Jan 2026

Beneath Asia’s busiest shipping routes, another contest is unfolding. It is not about oil or trade, but about data and who controls the cables that carry it.

A new consortium has announced plans for a large undersea cable system linking East and Southeast Asia. The project, called Candle, will run roughly 8,000km across the Asia-Pacific, adding fresh capacity and alternative routes to a network that is increasingly stretched.

The backers reveal the project’s importance. Meta, the American tech giant, has teamed up with SoftBank and regional telecom operators. Their shared concern is not simply speed, but resilience. Streaming video, cloud computing and digital payments rely on cables that are ageing and crowded. Traffic keeps rising, but redundancy has lagged behind.

Asia’s geography sharpens the risk. Earthquakes, undersea landslides and dense maritime traffic make cable breaks common. A single fault can disrupt entire countries. New routes reduce that danger by giving data somewhere else to go. For governments and firms alike, outages are no longer an inconvenience; they are an economic threat.

Meta’s role fits a broader shift. Big technology firms are taking direct stakes in physical infrastructure, rather than leaving it to telecoms alone. Control brings certainty. SoftBank adds experience: it has spent decades investing in subsea systems and argues that route diversity is as vital as raw capacity.

NEC, a Japanese firm, will build the cable using newer designs that carry far more data than older systems. The aim is longevity. Subsea cables are expensive and slow to replace; those laid today must still cope with traffic a decade from now.

The wider region may gain. Faster, more reliable links between Southeast Asia’s growing economies and hubs such as Japan could attract cloud providers and digital firms that need local capacity and low latency.

The obstacles are familiar: high costs, regulatory complexity and coordination across borders. Yet Candle’s message is blunt. Undersea cables are no longer invisible utilities. In the Asia-Pacific they have become strategic assets, and the next digital decade is already being laid on the seabed.