Subsea cables and oil pipelines: The infrastructure linking AI, empire, and occupation

Filed 1h ago · Via Global Voices · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Scheming Weasel faster

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Rijksmuseum · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Global Voices lays out how subsea internet cables, over 600 of them spanning 1.5 million kilometers, are overwhelmingly owned by Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, often following routes once used for oil extraction and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The piece ties this infrastructure to military policy, citing the FCC's expanded control list targeting China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, alongside Gulf investments like Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN AI venture and the $9 billion Pentagon cloud contract shared by the same four companies. It also connects Israel's reliance on the Leviathan gas field to US-backed AI infrastructure and Palestinian data sovereignty.

The throughline is that a handful of companies control both the pipes carrying the world's data and sit at the center of the energy and military contracts that keep those pipes running.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Four companies owning most of the wires the whole planet talks through is the kind of fact that sounds like a conspiracy pitch until you check it and it's just the invoice. Nobody voted for this, nobody regulated it in time, and the cables went in along the same routes as the old extraction business because that's where the money already was. A smart person would ask who answers for that. So far the answer seems to be nobody in particular.

Source: Read the original at Global Voices → Scored: Scheming Weasel faster · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0