BRICS Looks Beneath the Oceans as Bloc Moves Toward High-Speed Submarine Cable Network

BRICS countries have taken a potentially important step towards creating a new high-speed submarine communications network linking member states, bringing digital infrastructure and the physical routes carrying international data into the grouping’s expanding agenda on economic resilience and technological cooperation.

The New Delhi Declaration adopted at the 18th BRICS Summit confirms that a dedicated task force has completed a document titled “BRICS Cable Requirements: directive brief.” The document follows discussions initiated under the 2025 Rio de Janeiro Declaration on undertaking a technical and economic feasibility study for a high-speed communications network using submarine cables between BRICS countries.

Even at this preliminary stage, however, the proposal deserves attention because submarine cables are not simply telecommunications infrastructure. They are the physical arteries carrying the overwhelming majority of the world’s international digital traffic.

The Internet Runs Beneath the Oceans

Modern communications can appear almost entirely wireless to an ordinary user. Smartphones connect through mobile towers, laptops through Wi-Fi and satellites increasingly provide communications to remote locations. Yet once data begins travelling between continents, most of it does not travel through space.

It travels through fibre-optic cables laid across the seabed.

The International Telecommunication Union estimates that submarine telecommunications cables carry more than 99 per cent of international data traffic, supporting financial transactions, cloud computing, government communications, healthcare, education and commercial activity across borders. More than 500 active and planned cable systems form this global digital backbone.

A video call between continents, a cloud-computing request, an international banking transaction or data moving between corporate data centres may therefore ultimately depend on strands of optical fibre running thousands of kilometres across the ocean floor.

Control, diversity and resilience of these routes have consequently become matters of economic and increasingly strategic importance.

What BRICS Has Actually Agreed

The New Delhi Declaration stops well short of announcing that a BRICS cable will be built.

Instead, the declaration acknowledges submarine cable infrastructure as an important foundation for international digital connectivity and network resilience. It notes that the dedicated task force has completed the cable-requirements directive brief and asks the BRICS STI Steering Committee to identify the next steps towards the proposed technical and economic feasibility study.

Participation is explicitly described as voluntary and subject to the national priorities, regulations and circumstances of individual BRICS countries.

This distinction is significant. A feasibility study would have to determine whether an economically viable network can actually be constructed, which countries would participate, how much traffic it could attract, where cables should land, whether entirely new links are necessary and where capacity could instead be obtained through existing systems.

The project has therefore moved beyond a general political aspiration, but it has not yet reached the investment or construction stage.

The Work Began Before the New Delhi Summit

The submarine cable initiative has been progressing quietly through BRICS technical forums during 2026.

At the BRICS Science, Technology and Innovation ministerial process, members welcomed the task force’s completion of the Cable Requirements directive brief and encouraged it to propose the next steps for the feasibility study. Earlier BRICS ministerial discussions had also welcomed establishment of the Submarine Cable Task Force to advance the proposal.

India’s BRICS communications programme during 2026 also included discussions on submarine cable cooperation and development alongside secure digital infrastructure, digital public infrastructure and wider digital ecosystem cooperation.

The inclusion of the issue in the final leaders’ declaration therefore elevates what had largely been a technical discussion into an initiative carrying endorsement at the highest political level of the grouping.

Digital Sovereignty Requires Physical Infrastructure

BRICS countries have increasingly discussed digital sovereignty, payment-system interoperability, artificial intelligence, digital public infrastructure and technological resilience.

Yet all these systems eventually depend upon physical infrastructure.

A country may possess domestic data centres, cloud platforms, payment systems and digital public infrastructure, but communication between those systems and overseas partners still depends heavily on international fibre routes.

This makes submarine cables particularly important when countries begin discussing resilient digital ecosystems.

A BRICS-oriented network would not necessarily need to replace existing international cables. A more realistic objective would be to introduce additional routes, capacity and redundancy between participating economies.

That distinction matters because resilience normally comes from having more routes rather than attempting to isolate a network from the rest of the global Internet.

Why Route Diversity Matters

Submarine cables are highly reliable, but they are not invulnerable.

The ITU says cable disruptions can result from fishing activity, ship anchors, natural disasters, ageing infrastructure and other physical hazards. More than 170 cable repairs were reported globally in 2025 alone, equivalent to almost four failures per week.

The international advisory body established by the ITU and International Cable Protection Committee has consequently identified geographical diversity and redundancy as important elements of global cable resilience.

Its 2026 recommendations highlighted physical risk, repair delays and the dependence of some countries on relatively small numbers of cable systems as potential vulnerabilities.

If communications between major economies depend heavily on a small number of routes or geographic chokepoints, disruption along those corridors can affect far more than Internet browsing. Banking, corporate operations, cloud services and government communications can all be affected.

For BRICS, building or supporting additional cable routes could therefore serve both commercial and resilience objectives.

Geography Makes the BRICS Challenge Unusually Complex

Creating a network linking BRICS countries would be technically and commercially demanding because the grouping now spans an extraordinary geographic area.

Its members stretch across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America. Connecting those economies would potentially require networks crossing the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and linking them to extensive terrestrial infrastructure once cables reach shore.

A single continuous cable connecting every member would not necessarily be the most practical solution.

The eventual feasibility study could instead examine a system comprising several new cable segments, interconnections with existing infrastructure, leased capacity and strategic landing points that together create stronger connectivity among participating members.

This is one reason the Cable Requirements document is important. Before engineers determine where a cable should go, participating countries first need to determine what traffic volumes, redundancy requirements, landing locations and connectivity objectives the system is expected to serve.

India Could Become a Critical Junction

India occupies an important geographic position in any potential BRICS submarine cable architecture.

It sits between major cable routes extending westwards through the Arabian Sea towards the Gulf, Africa and Europe and eastwards through the Bay of Bengal towards Southeast and East Asia.

India is also experiencing rapid growth in data centres, cloud computing, digital payments and digital public infrastructure, all of which increase demand for high-capacity international connectivity.

Additional east-west cable links could therefore strengthen India’s position not simply as an end-user of international bandwidth but as an important digital transit and data-infrastructure hub connecting Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

For India, the strategic value would lie primarily in route diversity, additional capacity and resilience, rather than attempting to disconnect itself from existing global networks.

The Proposal Has a Historical Predecessor

Interestingly, this is not the first attempt to create a submarine cable associated with BRICS.

More than a decade ago, business groups proposed a 34,000-kilometre BRICS Cable intended to connect Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The concept envisaged a route extending through several continents and was promoted as a means of strengthening direct communications among the original BRICS economies.

The project ultimately failed to develop into the network originally envisioned.

Its experience provides a useful warning for the current initiative. Large submarine cable projects cannot succeed on political interest alone. They require enormous capital investment, sufficient commercial traffic, telecommunications operators willing to purchase capacity, regulatory approvals across multiple jurisdictions and long-term arrangements for maintenance and repair.

The current BRICS process appears more methodical. Instead of announcing a predetermined cable route, the grouping is first attempting to define requirements and then examine technical and economic feasibility.

The Commercial Question Will Be Crucial

Submarine cables are strategic assets, but they are also expensive commercial infrastructure.

A cable must generate enough demand for bandwidth to justify construction, operation and eventual upgrades. Telecom operators, hyperscale cloud companies, governments, financial institutions and other large users therefore become critical to determining whether a proposed route is viable.

This means the eventual BRICS study will have to answer an important question: whether sufficient traffic exists between member states to justify dedicated new infrastructure or whether a mixture of new cable segments and capacity on existing systems would provide better economics.

The earlier BRICS cable proposal encountered precisely this type of challenge. Contemporary cable technology and vastly higher data demand make today’s circumstances different, but commercial viability will remain fundamental.

A Cable Would Not Create a Separate BRICS Internet

The initiative should also not be misunderstood as an attempt to create an isolated BRICS Internet.

Nothing in the New Delhi Declaration proposes separating member countries from the existing global network. The document instead frames submarine cables in terms of international digital connectivity, capacity and network resilience.

Internet resilience generally improves when more routes are available.

If data can travel through several geographically distinct cable systems, traffic can be redirected when one route experiences a failure. A new BRICS-linked system could therefore complement the existing global cable architecture rather than replace it.

This would be similar to trade-route resilience: having another commercially viable corridor reduces dependence on any single route without requiring abandonment of existing ones.

Submarine Cables Are Becoming Strategic Infrastructure

The wider international environment also helps explain why the subject has returned to the BRICS agenda.

Governments around the world are paying increasing attention to submarine cables because digital economies have become critically dependent upon them. The ITU created an International Advisory Body on Submarine Cable Resilience with the International Cable Protection Committee specifically to address risks involving deployment, repair, physical damage and route concentration.

Its latest recommendations encourage governments and industry to increase geographic diversity, identify risks, shorten repair times and improve coordination during disruptions.

Submarine cables are therefore beginning to occupy a position similar to ports, energy pipelines, electricity interconnectors and shipping lanes: infrastructure that is commercial in normal times but strategically important during periods of disruption.

Digital Infrastructure Is Joining the BRICS Economic Agenda

The submarine cable proposal also fits into a much larger pattern emerging from the New Delhi Summit.

BRICS is simultaneously discussing interoperable payment systems, digital public infrastructure, artificial intelligence, industrial technology cooperation, critical minerals and more resilient trade and financial mechanisms.

All these initiatives require trusted and reliable connectivity.

A payments network cannot function without communications infrastructure. Digital public infrastructure needs data networks. Artificial intelligence requires large-scale movement of data between computing systems. International commerce increasingly depends upon cloud platforms and real-time digital transactions.

The physical cables beneath the oceans therefore form the unseen foundation beneath much of the digital architecture BRICS is attempting to build.

The Feasibility Study Is Now the Milestone to Watch

The immediate development to monitor is not a cable-laying ship entering the Indian Ocean.

It is whether BRICS formally proceeds with the Technical and Economic Feasibility Study.

That study would potentially begin answering the questions that will determine whether the project remains an aspiration or becomes real infrastructure: route, capacity, landing points, investment, ownership, participating countries, commercial demand and interaction with existing cable systems.

Only after those questions are answered could a construction proposal realistically emerge.

The New Delhi Declaration therefore represents an early but meaningful milestone. By completing the Cable Requirements directive brief and directing the task force to determine the next steps towards a feasibility study, BRICS has begun converting an abstract discussion about digital resilience into a technical infrastructure process.

Strategic Autonomy Now Extends Beneath the Sea

For years, debates about strategic autonomy concentrated primarily on defence equipment, energy supplies, financial systems and manufacturing.

The digital economy has added another dimension.

A country may control its data centres, payment platforms and software, but its international digital connections still depend on physical infrastructure stretching across national borders and ocean floors.

The BRICS submarine cable proposal recognises that reality.

Whether the project eventually becomes a new cable network remains uncertain, and significant commercial, technical and political obstacles lie ahead. But the fact that BRICS countries are now defining their collective cable requirements shows that digital resilience is moving beyond software, payment systems and policy.

Increasingly, strategic infrastructure also means controlling sufficient pathways through which information itself can move.

And many of those pathways lie thousands of metres beneath the world’s oceans.

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