Everything ChatGPT, banks, and hospitals need to function travels across the seafloor. No one knows. And almost no one protects it.
When you ask ChatGPT something, the answer travels to the bottom of the sea. Because of a cable that if broken, disconnects us completely. Suddenly, you don’t access your bank. You do not access your medical records. You don’t have email, or artificial intelligence to help you. Can you imagine it?
It happened to Venezuela. And we can learn from it.
99% of the internet travels by cable. Not by satellite.
That is the first piece of information that almost no one knows. More than 95% of the world’s international data traffic — and virtually 100% in Latin America — travels over subsea fiber-optic cables. Not by satellites. Not through the air. By cables that run along the ocean floor for thousands of miles.
Those cables are what make a bank transfer between Bogota and New York possible in milliseconds. Those that allow a doctor in Caracas to access a medical record stored in the cloud. Those who sustain the AI platforms that are redefining how we work, decide, and communicate.
Without subsea cables, Latin America has no digital economy. It’s that simple.
Why AI Needs This Cable — And Why It Changes Everything
The boom in artificial intelligence is not just a matter of algorithms. It’s a matter of physical infrastructure. The most advanced AI models — those that process language, image, video in real time — need to transmit massive volumes of data between servers on different continents with minimal latency.
Without high-capacity, low-latency submarine cables, that’s not possible. A country with obsolete or insufficient underwater infrastructure cannot be an artificial intelligence hub. It can’t appeal to hyperscalers — Google, Amazon, Microsoft — who are deciding where to build their next data centers in the region today.
Latin America has a real window of opportunity. The demand for AI is growing. Investment in digital infrastructure is looking for destinations. Countries that act now — that invest in redundancy, that modernize their cables, that simplify regulatory frameworks — will be the digital hubs of the next decade. Those who wait will depend on the decisions made by others.
A lesson not to be wasted
The subsea cable that connects Venezuela with the world had not cut a single cut for 20 years. Not one. Submarine fiber is the most reliable communications service out there — with an uptime of 99.9999%. For that cable to fail, it took a 7.5-magnitude earthquake, the first of that magnitude in Venezuela in almost 100 years.
The lesson is not that the infrastructure was weak. The lesson is that even the world’s most reliable infrastructure needs redundancy. Because improbable events happen. And when they do occur, a country’s resilience depends on the decisions it made years earlier.
The question that Latin America has to ask itself today is not when the next cable will fail. The question is how to build infrastructure so resilient that when it fails — because at some point it will fail — the impact lasts for hours, not weeks.
To better understand this world
The infrastructure that sustains the digital economy has its own vocabulary. In future installments we will explore each of these components in detail:
- Landing station — a country’s gateway to the global internet.
- SPOF — why a single point of failure can shut down an entire country.
- Redundancy — how to build resilient infrastructure.
- Latency — why speed matters more than it seems to AI.
Paul Choiseul
CTIO Chief Technology and Information Officer
Cirion Technologies
About Cirion Technologies
Cirion Technologies is a leading provider of digital infrastructure and technology solutions in Latin America. The company operates one of the region’s most comprehensive digital infrastructure platforms, integrating an extensive terrestrial and subsea fiber-optic network, carrier-neutral interconnection services, cloud connectivity, colocation services, and advanced digital solutions. These capabilities enable enterprises, service providers, and hyperscalers to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives across the region.
Press Contact
Marcelo Pineda Arango
Global Head of Marketing, Brand & Communications
marcelo.pineda@ciriontechnologies.com