Samanth Subramanian

But the main one is called HMN, which is a spinoff of Huawei.

And HMN has been in the cable business for a while now, like I think more than a decade.

And HMN doesn't really own cables outright.

HMN is kind of like these two or three big companies, including Subcom in the U.S., that lay cables.

They kind of go out there and they lay the cable for a corporate customer.

And so you could easily go to them and say, why don't you lay out cable instead?

It'll be sort of cheaper than these American companies that do it.

The problem here is that as for the last six or seven years, Chinese tech companies have been on sanctions lists around the world after the first Trump administration put them there.

So to go out and engage HMN and to ask Huawei to come and lay a cable is to sort of risk going against that sanctions list and therefore risk all kinds of punitive measures being enforced against you.

There used to be a time that the idyllic days, about eight or nine years ago, when Western companies and Chinese companies would come together in consortiums and lay cables jointly.

They would kind of bear part of the burden and they would figure out who was going to do the actual laying and how much bandwidth people would get.

Two or three of these projects have actually been frozen.

In one case, the cable has actually been laid, but nobody can switch it on because the U.S.

government doesn't want that to happen because a Chinese company is involved.

In two other cases, I think the mapping was done, the funds were committed, and then they had to kind of pull everything back.

There hasn't been a new cable laid between China and the U.S.

direct in years, in years, even though traffic between these two countries has never been greater.

So you have to route everything now through the Philippines or through Singapore.

It's like a very, very long way around to go from Chinese East Coast to the West Coast of the US.

So none of this is, of course, efficient in any way or desirable in any way.