Ninety-five percent of the world's internet traffic travels through cables lying on the ocean floor. Fifteen of those cables were cut in a single day in the Red Sea in September 2025, disrupting connectivity across the Middle East and South Asia. The seabed holds an estimated $150 trillion in mineral wealth, in a legal vacuum with no enforcement mechanism. Offshore wind, tidal energy, and subsea data infrastructure are tripling in investment simultaneously. The ocean floor is the next great geopolitical and economic battleground — and almost nobody is writing about it as a unified thesis.
Not investment advice. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Research and long-horizon thinking only. Consult a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decision. Figures cited are sourced from the Stockholm Environment Institute, Recorded Future, CSIS, A&O Shearman, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, OilPrice.com, and the OECD Ocean Economy database, current as of June 2026.
The global ocean economy — shipping, fisheries, offshore energy, subsea cable infrastructure, coastal tourism, aquaculture, and deep-sea mineral extraction — grew from $1.3 trillion in gross value added in 1995 to $2.6 trillion by 2020. If it were a country, it would rank as the world's fifth-largest economy, ahead of India, France, and the United Kingdom individually. Three-quarters of that growth occurred in Asia and the Pacific, primarily China, which has used its dominance of maritime commerce and its island-building programme in the South China Sea to convert ocean economic power into geopolitical leverage more deliberately and more successfully than any other power in the modern era.
What has changed since 2020 is the pace of industrialisation of the seabed itself. Marine spaces are no longer the open, largely ungoverned expanse that maritime law imagined when the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea was drafted in 1982. The modern ocean floor hosts thousands of kilometres of telecommunications cables, subsea power interconnectors, offshore wind anchor systems, and an accelerating build-out of deep-sea mining infrastructure. One hundred and nineteen new subsea cables are expected globally in 2026 alone — up from 66 in 2020 — driven primarily by demand from AI data centre expansion, which requires the kind of high-bandwidth intercontinental connectivity that satellite systems cannot economically provide at scale. The ocean is no longer a medium. It is becoming an industrial platform.
"Where maritime law once imagined the high seas as an open, largely ungoverned space, the modern ocean is increasingly crowded and industrialised." — Stockholm Environment Institute, January 2026
The most immediately striking and underreported dimension of this thesis is the vulnerability of the subsea cable network that carries virtually all of the world's international communications. There are currently 597 subsea cables in operation or under construction globally. Each telecommunications cable is between 4 and 5 centimetres in diameter — roughly the width of a garden hose — lying in water up to 2 kilometres deep, with no meaningful surveillance of the vast majority of its length, no enforcement jurisdiction in international waters, and repair timelines measured in weeks. The average cost of installation is $29,000–$53,000 per kilometre. The cost of a single vessel's anchor dragging across a cable, deliberately or otherwise, is near zero. The asymmetry is extreme.
The incident record since 2022 is not a list of accidents. It is a pattern. In September 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed in the Baltic Sea in an attack that has never been officially attributed. In October 2023, the EE-S1 data cable between Sweden and Estonia was damaged. In November 2024, the BCS East-West Interlink and the C-Lion1 data cables were cut. In December 2024, the Estlink 2 power cable was damaged. In January 2025, a Latvia fibreoptic cable was severed. And on approximately September 6, 2025, fifteen subsea cables in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea were severed simultaneously, disrupting internet connectivity across the Middle East and South Asia and disrupting Microsoft cloud services across the region.
Baltic Sea, Red Sea, and Indo-Pacific — the documented record
The polymetallic nodules lying on the floor of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific Ocean contain more nickel, cobalt, and manganese than all known land-based reserves combined. Deep-sea mineral deposits globally are estimated to contain resources valued at over $150 trillion — multiple times the combined annual output of the entire global economy. They are also the subject of one of the most dysfunctional governance situations in contemporary international law, and the dysfunction became acute in 2026.
The International Seabed Authority — the UN body responsible under UNCLOS for governing extraction from international seabed areas — met in Kingston, Jamaica in March 2026 and failed to deliver any of its expected outcomes. No exploitation activities were approved. The Mining Code, intended to govern commercial seabed extraction, remains unfinished and deeply contested on the most fundamental questions: benefit-sharing, liability regimes, environmental compensation. Into this vacuum, the United States is moving unilaterally. The Metals Company, a US-based enterprise, has proceeded with exploration activities that bypass ISA regulations. NOAA has simplified permitting to allow exploration and commercial recovery applications simultaneously. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is advancing mineral lease sales in US EEZ areas off American Samoa, Alaska, and Virginia. And in April 2026, AOMC and Odyssey Marine Exploration announced a $1 billion all-stock merger — a Nasdaq-listed deep-sea critical minerals platform, operational, with exploration rights in two separate zones.
Offshore wind is growing at a pace that is reshaping European energy geopolitics — fisheries agreements are being negotiated alongside defence partnerships specifically because offshore wind farms now occupy the same maritime zones as historic fishing grounds. Tidal and ocean thermal energy conversion are entering commercial scale. Capacity constraints in offshore subsea vessels and deepwater infrastructure are already building in 2026, with intensification projected through 2027 as a new wave of deepwater FIDs come to fruition. The seabed is becoming a renewable energy platform faster than the regulatory frameworks that govern it are updating.
AI's insatiable bandwidth demand is the single fastest-growing driver of new cable construction. The same semiconductor supply chain that created the chip shortage is creating a cable construction shortage: specialised cable-laying vessels, fibre manufacturing capacity, and subsea connector systems are all in constrained supply. The companies that own the picks and shovels of this build-out — cable manufacturers like SubCom, Nokia's subsea unit, and Prysmian — are quietly benefiting from an infrastructure cycle that most investors have not yet identified as distinct from the broader AI infrastructure trade.
The critical mineral dependency that this series identified in Letters 31 (Commodity Realignment) and 43 (The Robot in the Family — harmonic drives and permanent magnets) has a deep-sea resolution pathway that is politically contentious but technically real. Polymetallic nodules, cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts, and seafloor massive sulphides contain the nickel, cobalt, manganese, and rare earth elements that the energy transition requires. The governance question — who has authority to extract, who benefits, and who bears environmental liability — will define the geopolitical contest for the seabed over the next two decades.
The cable incident record has created an entirely new defence market: autonomous underwater vehicle surveillance of cable routes, AI-powered seabed anomaly detection, rapid-deployment cable repair systems, and naval escort protocols for cable-laying operations. The US Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2026 and the EU's parallel submarine cable security action plan (2025–2026) both include significant procurement mandates. The asymmetry between the cost of attacking subsea infrastructure and the cost of defending it is so extreme that this is one of the few defence technology markets where deterrence requires physical monitoring rather than nuclear-scale response capability.
The ocean thesis is genuinely convergent across five major investment themes simultaneously — and that convergence is also the reason it is difficult to express as a single clean trade. Subsea cable security, deep-sea mining, offshore renewable energy, maritime surveillance technology, and critical minerals governance are distinct markets with distinct regulatory environments, distinct risk profiles, and distinct timelines. The single-thesis framing in this letter is analytically useful for understanding why the ocean matters; it is less useful as a portfolio construction guide without breaking it into specific sector exposures.
The deep-sea mining opportunity is the most financially significant and the most legally treacherous part of this thesis. The US unilateralism — bypassing ISA governance, issuing permits outside UNCLOS frameworks — may produce short-term extraction rights that are legally challenged, environmentally costly, and geopolitically isolating in the very Indo-Pacific partnerships that underpin the broader US strategy. An investor buying early into a deep-sea mining operation without understanding the governance risk is not buying a critical minerals play — they are buying a legal and political risk with a minerals upside attached.
The ocean floor is not a metaphor for the unknown — it is increasingly a specific, industrial, contested, and strategically critical environment in which the economic and military competition of the next half-century will partly be decided. The internet runs through it. The energy transition depends on what it contains. The shipping lanes that connect the global economy traverse it. And the legal framework that was supposed to govern it was written for a world that no longer exists, by a process that has not produced an enforcement mechanism in 44 years of trying. The powers that understand this earliest — that treat the seabed as the frontier it has become rather than the afterthought it was — will have advantages in the 2030s that will be very difficult to close from behind. The race for the seabed has begun. Most investors have not noticed.
Long-horizon thinking on capital, technology, and the forces shaping the next decade of wealth creation. Written from first principles. Not consensus. Not noise.