The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) closed the Strait of Hormuz on March 2, choking off a fifth of the world’s oil supplies and causing the “worst oil crisis in history.” However, the IRGC has another card to play: the Strait is also a digital highway for the global internet and if it cuts the cables that run along the bottom of the shallow waterway, it could cause a new level of chaos.

Beneath the same waters are fibre-optic cables that carry the internet traffic of an entire region — and that, if severed, would plunge the Gulf states into a digital darkness for which there is no quick repair or alternative routes available.

The Iranian Tasnim News Agency recently published a detailed map of undersea internet cables running through the Strait of Hormuz, accompanied by a commentary that highlighted at least seven major communication cables that serve all the Gulf states. More than 97% of global internet traffic runs through these cable networks on the seabed of the waterway that is currently under the complete control of the IRGC. In what was clearly a thinly veiled threat, the report drew particular attention to the concentration of cloud and data-centre infrastructure in the UAE, framing landing stations and data hubs as strategic pressure points.

The Saudi-backed Iran International highlighted that the report took care to highlight that Gulf Arab states on the southern shore — the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — depend far more heavily on maritime internet routes than Iran does as it has never granted permits for cables to be laid in its own territorial waters. All cables transiting the Strait of Hormuz run through Omani waters.

The cables: what they are and what they carry

The Strait is as strategic for the passage of data as it is for the passage of oil and gas and plays a significant role in connecting Asia to Europe.

The active submarine cables transiting the Strait of Hormuz include:

Asia-Africa-Europe 1, known as AAE-1, which connects Southeast Asia to Europe via Egypt with landing points in the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia;

the FALCON network, connecting India and Sri Lanka to Gulf countries, Sudan and Egypt;

the Gulf Bridge International cable system, linking all Gulf countries including Iran; and

the Tata TGN-Gulf system, owned by India's Tata Communications (NSE: TATACOMM), which connects the Gulf with global networks.

These are not small systems. Subsea cables carry around 99% of the world's internet traffic, according to the International Telecommunication Union. They are the core physical layer of the modern internet, with satellites playing only a niche role due to limited capacity.

The 2Africa cable — a 45,000-kilometre Meta (NASDAQ: META)-led consortium system — was designed to carry up to 21 terabits on each of its 16 fibre-optic pairs, equivalent to roughly over one million satellite connections simultaneously. No satellite constellation in existence today, including Starlink, can replace that throughput at the scale required by a city like Dubai, according to S&P Global.

The Gulf states have been investing heavily in AI and digital infrastructure as part of their economic “Vision” diversification away from oil.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have established national AI companies — including G42, Humain and others — that are partnered with major US technology firms and serve customers across the region and beyond. Building up a digital economy has been a big part of their strategy to break their addiction to oil exports.

All of that infrastructure depends on the undersea cables to move data at the speeds required for AI workloads, cloud computing and financial services. Tellingly, Iranian drones struck at data centres in Bahrain and the UAE in the earliest stages of the war, sending a chilling message to the Arab governments of what might be in store if the US escalates the war further.

What happens if the cables are cut

The impact of cable damage would vary significantly by country, according to TeleGeography's research director Alan Mauldin, who has produced the most detailed public assessment of the Hormuz cable risk. Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar have terrestrial network connections to Saudi Arabia, while Kuwait is also connected to Iraq — these terrestrial routes offer onward connectivity, though their capacity may not be sufficient to handle the complete rerouting of traffic if subsea systems are damaged. The UAE is in a more exposed position: its cables largely land at the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman and outside the Strait of Hormuz. While it has terrestrial connections to neighbours, the capacity of those alternatives is limited.

And there is a precedent from the Red Sea. In 2024, three cables were damaged by Houthi activity; it took six months to repair them. In September 2025, four cables were damaged; five months later three had been repaired and one remained out of service.

The Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea are now simultaneously effectively no-go zones for commercial cable repair vessels. Any cables damaged by missiles, naval mines or Iran’s fleet of hard-to-spot mini-subs, will remain severed — potentially for the entire duration of the conflict, says S&P Global – causing a war-long internet blackout throughout the entire Gulf region.

Currently there is only a single cable repair vessel inside the Gulf. Other vessels are in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, but have no access to the Persian Gulf. And it is highly unlikely that that single vessel would be given IRGC permission to enter the Strait itself if the cables were cut.

India would also be one of the biggest losers. New Delhi has positioned itself as the next great digital economy and is targeting $270bn in data-centre investment. However, India's westward connectivity with Europe relies heavily on traversing the Red Sea and Persian Gulf digital corridors. If the Hormuz closure persists, India's AI ambitions may face not only soaring power costs from disrupted energy markets but also degraded international connectivity – a double economic whammy. India's technology export revenues reached $224bn last year, growing 4.6% y/y, according to NASSCOM's Strategic Review 2025. Total technology industry revenue including domestic sales reached $283bn.

The billion-dollar pipeline that cannot be built

The conflict has also frozen the next generation of cable infrastructure development plans at the worst possible moment.

Saudi Arabia's stc Group, majority-owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, has been investing $800mn in SilkLink, a 4,500-kilometre fibre-optic network and cable landing station programme.

Qatar's Ooredoo is developing Fibre in the Gulf, a $500mn cable corridor that would pass through the Strait of Hormuz and run overland through Iraq, Turkey and France.

An Emirati-Iraqi consortium called WorldLink has been funding a $700mn hybrid fibre-optic project running from the UAE to Iraq's Al Faw Peninsula and across to Turkey.

All of these projects are now stalled.

The SEA-ME-WE 6 Gulf Extension, which had aimed to route through the Strait of Hormuz and land on Saudi Arabia's eastern coast before crossing the Arabian Peninsula terrestrially, appears delayed from its already-postponed June 2027 target.

The Stimson Center, which has studied Gulf digital infrastructure in depth, noted that Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar joined international consortia specifically to build cable routes that diversify away from chokepoints such as Hormuz, but none of this work was finished by the time the war broke out.

Building the digital analogy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s westward pipelines that has provided a backdoor for its oil exports is complex and time consuming. Building fibre-optic cables on land involves a myriad of legal and regulatory requirements because of the data moving across multiple borders. Building undersea cables is considerably easier.