Samanth Subramanian

All those big tech companies are now engaged in their own kind of AI efforts and often very big, large scale ones of that.

And so I think like the need for these cables and the need to lay more cables and at a faster clip is only going to increase because I think you're going to have more AI training data centers out there.

You're going to have more flows of data.

And so people were kind of worried for a little while, maybe about five or six years ago, people were talking about the fact that maybe there was a lot of cables out there right now and that maybe we didn't need to lay any more new cables for the foreseeable future because we were kind of set.

But the AI boom has changed all that.

It is also true that the cabling industry follows a similar trajectory to the world economy.

When there's a recession, it goes down.

People stop laying cables because it's very expensive to finance as a project.

After the dot-com boom, for example, in early 2000 and the dot-com bust, there was a period of stasis that lasted for almost like five years.

There was all this extra cabling that had been ordered up, but nobody was laying it because it was just too expensive.

So I think part of it is cyclical and it will follow the trajectory of the economy itself.

But I think as far as the AI revolution or the AI boom goes, as long as that persists, I think we'll still need to see more and more cables being laid just to make this entire project possible.

No, I don't think that exists yet.

I mean, there have been instances in the past, I think, of like financiers deciding that they want to lay their own overland cables.

I can't remember which book it was.

I think maybe it was Rocket Boys, but it was a Michael Lewis book about flash traders.

Flash Boys, that's right.

That opens with the laying of a cable over land, not under sea, but that does exist.

But I think the only sort of big entities that decide that they need their own cables

and they're going to lay them and exclude everybody else from them, are the big militaries of the world.