Amazon is developing its first fully owned subsea fiber-optic cable, named Fastnet, to link United States with Ireland.

Subsea fiber-optic cables handle more than 95 per cent of global international data and voice traffic, transmitting hundreds of terabits per second, including government communications, financial transactions, emails, video calls, and streaming services.

Amazon has previously participated in subsea cable projects such as Jako, Bifrost, and Havfrue through consortium partnerships.

However, Fastnet marks the first time the tech giant is independently developing a subsea cable project.

“Subsea is really essential for for AWS and for any connectivity internationally across oceans,” Matt Rehder, Amazon Web Services vice president of core networking, stated

“Without subsea you’d have to rely on satellite connectivity which can work,” he said. “But satellite has higher latency, higher costs and you just can’t get enough capacity or throughput to what our customers and the internet in general needs.”

Amazon says its Fastnet subsea cable will deliver over 320 terabits per second of capacity, enough to stream about 12.5 million HD movies at once.

The project aims to meet growing demand for cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and edge applications powered by Amazon Web Services.

Beyond boosting capacity, Fastnet will enhance Amazon’s network resilience. While the company did not disclose the project’s cost, it expects the cable to become operational by 2028. Other tech giants, including Google, Meta, and Microsoft, are also expanding their subsea cable investments.