Insight: The Impact Of AI On Submarine Network Infrastructure And Future Connectivity

By Thomas Soerensen, Vice President of Global Submarine Solutions at Ciena

Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption is surging globally, creating innovative new services and entirely new business models. PwC anticipates that the potential ramifications of AI for the Middle East are enormous – to the tune of US$320 billion – with the UAE expected to witness the biggest impact of close to 14% of GDP by 2030.

As AI model training and inference require unprecedented data movement, data center experts predict a massive leap in bandwidth needs. This shift is putting enormous pressures on submarine cable infrastructure to optimize routing, reduce downtime, and drive sustainability.

Unknown to many, submarine networks carry 99 percent of the world's intercontinental electronic communications traffic – and are the lifeline powering AI workloads today. According to reports, a record 161,100 km of submarine cables are planned to become ready for service (RFS) in 2025, dwarfing the previous high of 121,000 km becoming RFS back in 2001.

This is the largest ever deployment of optical submarine cables, representing a positive trend for international capacity and creating opportunities for terrestrial backhaul networks, data centers, and cloud and AI services in new geographies. Despite critical data traversing it, submarine networks were treated differently to terrestrial networks until very recently – but this is set to change in the future.

Evolution of submarine networks

The rapid expansion of AI infrastructure in existing and new data centres will have a profound impact on data center interconnect (DCI) networks that are critical to the success of AI applications and use cases. Historically, network traffic has grown at a rate of 20-30% per year, however, AI is pushing operators to rethink their architectures and plan for the intersection of submarine cable networks and AI.

Submarine cables are designed with capacity, latency and distance in mind, so each one has a very unique personality. For instance, Ciena's unique submarine network architecture, GeoMesh Extreme combines hardware, software, and professional services, allowing submarine cable operators to scale information-carrying capabilities, protect multiple terabits of traffic from inevitable cable faults, and lower the total cost of network ownership to protect revenues and margins.

Submarine networking has recently seen several technological evolutions, such as the increased number of fibre pairs enabled by SDM technology, the rapid adoption and adaption of coherent detection modems, ROADMs, mesh networks, and software innovation — all originally designed for terrestrial networks. The use of coherent and ROADM technology over submarine cables unites land, sea, and cloud-based networks, enabling seamless end-to-end networks that maximise optical spectrum efficiency to keep pace with bandwidth demands.

As a result, operators have been able to improve the monetisation of their assets. It has also given them the building blocks they need to design and build customised end-to-end networks, transforming a static and conservative market to dramatically change the design, deployment, and management of submarine networks.

Powering the Next Wave of Connectivity

With digital infrastructure expanding rapidly and the bandwidth demands driven by AI, the role of submarine networks has never been more critical. Operators providing wave services are ready to seize the opportunity by proactively routing new submarine cables to emerging data centres and innovating to address challenges. The path ahead involves not only expanding network capacities but also enhancing security measures to protect data in transit.

Another important technology evolution in the submarine space is the growing activity around Managed Optical Fiber Network (MOFN) whereby the telco designs and builds a network to the cloud or hyperscaler's technical requirements and then operates it as a managed service. MOFN allows cloud providers and hyperscalers to speed their ability to increase network capacity and expand their network reach. Ciena is actively facilitating many of these MOFN arrangements between service providers and hyperscalers, helping to shape the future of global connectivity.

By working together, telcos and hyperscale's can unlock the full potential of the digital economy, delivering seamless, high-performance solutions to meet the world's growing data needs. As international telecommunications traffic is projected to experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 25% from 2023 to 2030, there is a growing need for enhanced communications capacity to connect this infrastructure and enable new applications and platforms.

Thanks to the growth of submarine networks, operators can select from a broad array of vendors' best-in-breed technologies to streamline operational processes, accelerate service innovation and time to market, and keep up with the demands of web-scale content players that account for an ever-increasing share of transoceanic bandwidth growth.