Amazon just announced Fastnet, its first solo subsea cable project connecting Maryland to Ireland with 320 terabits per second capacity - enough to stream 12.5 million HD movies simultaneously. The move marks a strategic shift as AWS doubles down on infrastructure ownership to meet exploding AI and cloud demand, setting up a 2028 showdown with Google and Meta in the subsea arms race.
Amazon is taking the plunge on its biggest infrastructure bet yet. The company just broke ground on Fastnet, a massive subsea fiber-optic cable that'll stretch 3,000 miles from Maryland's Eastern shore straight to County Cork, Ireland, marking the first time the tech giant has gone solo on such a project.
The timing isn't accidental. Amazon's AWS division is seeing unprecedented demand for AI infrastructure, and the company needs dedicated bandwidth to keep pace. "Subsea is really essential for AWS and for any connectivity internationally across oceans," Matt Rehder, Amazon Web Services vice president of core networking, told CNBC in an exclusive interview. The admission reveals just how critical these underwater highways have become.
Fastnet's specifications are staggering. The cable will deliver over 320 terabits per second - that's enough bandwidth to simultaneously stream 12.5 million HD movies or handle the equivalent of millions of AI training sessions. For context, that's roughly 50 times faster than what most major cities consider high-speed internet today.
This represents a major strategic shift for Amazon. Previously, the company participated in subsea projects like Jako, Bifrost, and Havfrue as part of industry consortiums, sharing costs and capacity with other tech giants. But Fastnet changes that dynamic entirely, giving AWS complete control over a transatlantic data pipeline.
The move comes as subsea cables have become the invisible backbone of the modern internet. These underwater fiber networks carry over 95% of international data and voice traffic, from government communications to financial transactions. Without them, companies would have to rely on satellite connectivity, which Rehder notes has "higher latency, higher costs and you just can't get enough capacity."
Amazon isn't alone in this infrastructure race. Google and Meta have been aggressively expanding their subsea footprint, with Microsoft not far behind. The competition reflects a broader trend of tech giants vertically integrating their infrastructure to support AI workloads that demand massive, reliable bandwidth.
