Almost all international internet traffic travels through cables that lie on the ocean floor. As the world leans more heavily on cloud computing and artificial intelligence, demand for these undersea links is hitting record highs.
Yet in the United States only one company can both fabricate and install such cables. We toured its 73‑year‑old plant and boarded a multimillion‑dollar cable‑laying vessel to see how it stays current—and why our data still must travel thousands of feet beneath the sea.