Indian Council of World Affairs

“Due to the growing instability in the Red Sea, commercial shipping vessels near Jeddah anchored, dragging in the shallow and high-traffic maritime lanes, leading to the undersea cable cuts in September 2025. The incident forced Microsoft to reroute Azure traffic across Asia, including West Asia, with users from the UAE to India reporting slower connections for days. It was the third such disruption in eighteen months. Therefore, countries turned to the Medusa Submarine Cable System as a more resilient alternative submarine cable route, which was initially launched in February 2022. Spanning 8,760 km, it is an open-access submarine cable network connecting Southern Europe and North Africa.  In this context, this paper examines Medusa's cable characteristics and operational capacity, with particular focus on its strategic value and how it strengthens regional and global supply chain continuity amid ongoing geopolitical turbulence.” 

What Is Medusa?

Submarine cables form the physical backbone of the internet, carrying approximately 95% of global data traffic across more than 600 systems (including SEA-ME-WE 5, AAE-1, EIG, and PEACE). However, the Red Sea and Mediterranean, two of the world's busiest and most strategically contested maritime corridors, remain highly vulnerable to disruption. Medusa is the first submarine fibre optic cable system built explicitly as a resilient infrastructure for these vulnerable corridors, rather than simply adding transmission capacity alongside them. Owned by AFR-IX Telecom, a Barcelona-headquartered telecom infrastructure operator, and built by Alcatel Submarine Networks, a Nokia subsidiary, Medusa is the first and longest cable connecting all five North African coastal states – Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt – to Southern Europe, with 18 landing points across 13 countries and a design capacity of 480 Tbit/s across 24 fibre pairs.[i] The total project investment is approximately €342 million. The European Union (EU) has backed the project with €38.3 million through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF Digital) programme, alongside €40 million in grants and up to €100 million in loans from the European Investment Bank.[ii] Nokia's 1830 GX platform supports high capacity, connectivity for '5G, cloud computing, and AI-driven applications.'[iii]

Figure: Present Map of Medusa Submarine Cable System. Source: TeleGeography

The Medusa system is being deployed in phases, beginning with the first landing at Marseille, France, on 8 October 2025, followed by Bizerte (Tunisia); Nador (Morocco); and Misrata (Libya), thereby strengthening these countries' national "digital sovereignty" amid regional instability.[iv] Egypt has connected Medusa from Port Said to Red Sea stations at Suez, Zafarana, and Ras Ghareb by the end of 2025.[v] Medusa has already linked over 500 research institutions in North Africa with EU National Research and Education Networks (NRENs).[vi]

Following the EU Global Gateway Forum meeting on 9–10 October 2025, Medusa has also advanced its expansion into West Asia, with the Aqaba port in Jordan prioritised and Syria's Tartus station connected.[vii] This expansion has also drawn Gulf commercial interest; Etihad Salam of Saudi Arabia and AFR-IX Telecom entered a partnership to extend Medusa into the Kingdom via Aqaba.[viii] For the EU, Medusa expresses the Global Gateway strategy and counters China's Digital Silk Road, under which Chinese-backed HMN Technologies has built or repaired almost 100 of the world's 400 submarine cables, around 25% of existing subsea cables worldwide.[ix]

Medusa as Strategic Support Infrastructure

Medusa should not be viewed as an alternative to the Red Sea or the Strait of Hormuz corridors; instead, it serves as a complementary Mediterranean redundancy layer that mitigates the latency cost of future disruptions in the region. The outbreak of the Gaza conflict in late 2023 and the regionalisation of this conflict drew many regional state and non-state actors. Particularly, Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping in solidarity with Gaza have made the waters less safe for maritime traffic and contributed to a rise in anchor-drag accidents responsible for several recent cable cuts, including the severing of the AAE-1, EIG, and SEACOM cables in February 2024.[x] As the conflict became further regionalised and protracted with the direct confrontation between Israel and Iran, the PEACE cable went offline in March 2025, and traffic was rerouted but at significant latency cost, slowing cloud services, degrading enterprise connectivity, and causing delays in financial transactions across the affected region.

Medusa is designed to bypass the geopolitical turmoil: because its route runs through the Mediterranean, it is shielded from the physical and security risks affecting the Red Sea corridor. This allows it to absorb rerouted traffic and reduce the added latency such disruptions cause. Through Telecom Egypt's terrestrial crossing network, Medusa's Port Said landing creates a routing bridge between the Mediterranean and the Gulf corridor without relying on the Bab-el-Mandeb and Strait of Hormuz chokepoints.[xi]

Medusa’s multi-stakeholder ownership model, supported by EU financing rather than a single state or a private technology giant, further distinguishes it from Chinese-backed cable systems, where ownership concentration has prompted Western governments to raise supply chain security concerns.[xii]

Medusa: The Regional and Global Supply Chain

Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco together account for more than 8% of European companies' procurement, according to QIMA's Q2 2025 data, which also shows inspection requests, a proxy for new supplier relationships, rising sharply in Morocco (+53%), Egypt (+73%), and Tunisia (+35%).[xiii] Recognising this trend, the EU's Global Gateway has backed the Southern Mediterranean with €7 billion in direct EU investment to mobilise up to €30 billion in public and private investment for the 2021-2027 period, supporting interconnections and open markets for EU companies in the region.[xiv]

Successful nearshoring increasingly depends on robust digital infrastructure. Just-in-time logistics, ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, real-time trade finance, and inventory management all require low-latency, reliable data connections between North African production sites and European headquarters. A 2025 cross-country study by the Foundation for Studies and Research on International Development (FERDI) found that doubling submarine cable capacity typically cuts mobile broadband prices significantly and improves service adoption; applied to this corridor, that pattern points to lower costs for the ERP systems, trade finance platforms, and logistics coordination that North African production sites depend on.[xv] Medusa, providing dedicated, high-capacity links between these economies and Southern Europe, is direct infrastructure for this shift: without it, supply chain relocation would continue to rely on older, congested cables not built for this volume of enterprise traffic.

In March 2025, AFR-IX secured €14.3 million from the European Commission to extend Medusa toward West Africa, with Gabon signing as the first Sub-Saharan landing partner (targeted 2028).[xvi] The USTDA (U.S. Trade and Development Agency) separately granted $1.52 million to study extension to 22 more African countries.[xvii] A second supply chain dimension emerges as Medusa connects to Egypt’s Red Sea network which supports Gulf states’ AI and cloud computing ambitions by paving a resilient route to European data centres.

Conclusion

In December 2025, the European Council on Foreign Relations called the EU 'a latecomer to African digital connectivity,' pointing to Medusa as proof that European-backed, open-access infrastructure can be built at scale.[xviii] Medusa is unlikely to replace the Red Sea's strained digital routes, instead it provides a resilient layer of connectivity outside the region's conflict zone, while strengthening the digital infrastructure required for Mediterranean nearshoring. As the first phase nears completion in 2026, Medusa's significance will lie not only in its physical scale but also in the open-access, sovereignty-respecting model it represents. If successfully replicated, this model could redefine the development of resilient digital infrastructure in an era of intensifying geopolitical competition.

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*Ishika Haldar is a Research Intern at the Indian Council of World Affairs.
Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal.

Endnotes

[i] "Agreement between AFR-IX Telecom and ASN for the Construction of Medusa Submarine Cable System, the Largest Submarine Cable in the Mediterranean Sea," Medusa Submarine Cable System, February 17, 2022. https://medusascs.com/news/agreement-between-afr-ix-telecom-and-asn-for-the-construction-of-medusa-submarine-cable-system-the-largest-submarine-cable-in-the-mediterranean-sea/ (Accessed June 15, 2026).

[ii] "Medusa," Submarine Networks, https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/asia-europe-africa/medusa (Accessed June 15, 2026).

[iii] Nokia. "Nokia Selected for Medusa Submarine Cable System to Bring New Connectivity across Europe and North Africa," Customer Success, Nokia.com, https://www.nokia.com/customer-success/nokia-selected-for-medusa-submarine-cable-system-to-bring-new-connectivity-across-europe-and-north-africa/ (Accessed June 15, 2026).

[iv] Medusa Submarine Cable System. "Medusa Submarine Cable System Lands in Marseille," Medusa Submarine Cable System (blog), October 8, 2025, https://medusascs.com/news/medusa-lands-in-marseille/ (Accessed June 17, 2026); Swinhoe, Dan. "Medusa Subsea Cable Lands in Tunisia," Data Center Dynamics, November 3, 2025, https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/medusa-subsea-cable-lands-in-tunisia/ (Accessed June 17, 2026); “Medusa Submarine Cable System Lands in Nador," Medusa Submarine Cable System, December 17, 2025, https://medusascs.com/news/medusa-submarine-cable-system-lands-in-nador/ (Accessed July 1, 2026); Zaptia, Sami. "Medusa Submarine Cable Project Linking Libya with Europe Inaugurated," Libya Herald, May 12, 2025, https://libyaherald.com/2025/05/medusa-submarine-cable-project-linking-libya-with-europe-inaugurated/ (Accessed June 18, 2026).

[v] Telecom Egypt. "Medusa Submarine Cable to Connect to the Red Sea through Telecom Egypt," Investor Relations, Telecom Egypt, September 28, 2023, https://ir.te.eg/en/CorporateNews/PressRelease/185/Medusa-Submarine-Cable-to-Connect-to-the-Red-Sea-through-Telecom-Egypt (Accessed June 18, 2026).

[vi] European Commission. "Scale Up: MEDUSA Submarine Cable" (infographic, Global Gateway Forum, 2025), https://global-gateway-forum.ec.europa.eu/document/download/eb478d6d-510a-42f1-acca-8826e538969b_en?filename=ggf2025-scale-up-medusa-submarine-cable-infographic_en.pdf (Accessed June 19, 2026).

[vii] European Commission, Directorate-General for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf. "Global Gateway Forum: EU for Strategic Expansion of the Medusa Submarine Cable System to the Middle East," Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf, October 10, 2025, https://north-africa-middle-east-gulf.ec.europa.eu/news/global-gateway-forum-eu-strategic-expansion-medusa-submarine-cable-system-middle-east-2025-10-10_en (Accessed June 18, 2026); Medusa Submarine Cable System. "Tartous, Syria: Medusa Signs Agreement with Syria Telecom to Establish a New East-to-West Route," Medusa Submarine Cable System (blog), October 25, 2025, https://medusascs.com/news/tartous-syria-medusa-signs-agreement-with-syria-telecom-to-establish-a-new-east-to-west-route/ (Accessed July 7, 2026); Swinhoe, Dan. "Medusa Subsea Cable to Land in Syria," Data Center Dynamics, October 27, 2025, republished in SubTel Forum, October 29, 2025, https://subtelforum.com/medusa-subsea-cable-to-land-in-syria/ (Accessed June 18, 2026).

[viii] Qiu, Winston. "Etihad Salam and AFR-IX Telecom to Extend Medusa Cable to Saudi Arabia," Submarine Networks, October 23, 2025, https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/asia-europe-africa/medusa/etihad-salam-and-afr-ix-telecom-to-extend-medusa-cable-to-saudi-arabia (Accessed June 18, 2026).

[ix] Yuka Koshino. "The Changing Submarine Cables Landscape: Expanding the EU's Role in the Indo-Pacific," European Union Institute for Security Studies, October 30, 2024, https://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/briefs/changing-submarine-cables-landscape (Accessed June 18, 2026).

[x] International Crisis Group, "Calming the Red Sea's Turbulent Waters," April 2, 2025, https://www.crisisgroup.org/rpt/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/yemen/248-calming-red-seas-turbulent-waters (Accessed July 2, 2026)

[xi] "Medusa Submarine Cable to Connect to the Red Sea through Telecom Egypt," Telecom Egypt, Investor Relations, September 28, 2023, https://ir.te.eg/en/CorporateNews/PressRelease/185/Medusa-Submarine-Cable-to-Connect-to-the-Red-Sea-through-Telecom-Egypt (Accessed June 18, 2026).

[xii] Yuka Koshino. "The Changing Submarine Cables Landscape: Expanding the EU's Role in the Indo-Pacific," European Union Institute for Security Studies, October 30, 2024, https://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/briefs/changing-submarine-cables-landscape (Accessed June 18, 2026).

[xiii] QIMA ("Quality Inspection Management"). "Nearshoring and Reshoring Trends: Recent Updates," QIMA (blog), May 24, 2024, https://blog.qima.com/traceability/nearshoring-reshoring-trends (Accessed June 20, 2026).

[xiv] European Commission. "Southern Mediterranean and the Gulf," https://commission.europa.eu/topics/southern-mediterranean-and-gulf_en (Accessed June 19, 2026).

[xv] Foundation for Studies and Research on International Development (FERDI). "The Impact of Submarine Cables on Internet Access Price, and the Role of Competition and Regulation," FERDI Working Paper, June 2025. https://ferdi.fr/en/publications/881e3aa3-bf28-494a-bfa9-0dac7a443e97 (Accessed June 18, 2026).

[xvi] "ACE Gabon and Medusa Africa Sign Construction and Maintenance Agreement for Medusa Submarine Cable Landing in Port-Gentil," Medusa Submarine Cable System, March 19, 2025, https://medusascs.com/news/ace-gabon-and-medusa-africa-sign-construction-and-maintenance-agreement-for-medusa-submarine-cable-landing-in-port-gentil/ (Accessed June 20, 2026).

[xvii] U.S. Trade and Development Agency, "Medusa Africa Subsea Cable System," https://www.ustda.gov/business_opp_oversea/medusa-africa-subsea-cable-system/ (Accessed June 20, 2026).

[xviii] Alberto Rizzi. "Zeros and Wins: How Europe Can Support Africa's Digital Growth," European Council on Foreign Relations, December 5, 2025, https://ecfr.eu/article/zeros-and-wins-how-europe-can-support-africas-digital-growth/(Accessed June 22, 2026).