Egypt is trying to cement its position as a global data corridor, but an international report is raising concerns about resilience. The country sits on one of the planet’s most vital digital chokepoints, carrying an estimated 17% of global internet traffic, and the world’s cable-resilience watchdog just flagged that position as a risk to manage. The verdict comes from the International Advisory Body on Submarine Cable Resilience, established by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC), in its final report (pdf) on the subsea cables carrying more than 99% of global data traffic.

Egypt’s Red Sea and Mediterranean corridors sit at the center of the warning. The Suez Canal corridor carries an estimated 90% of Europe-Asia data traffic through more than 100 miles of shallow water — where cables are more vulnerable to anchor strikes and seismic activity — before reaching the Mediterranean, the report notes, citing industry data. Bab Al Mandeb is similarly flagged as the world’s most cable-dense chokepoint, with at least 17 cables passing through a strait less than 14 miles wide, carrying an estimated 17-20% of global internet traffic.

The report names the concentration of cable traffic through Egyptian waters a “systemic vulnerability,” meaning that a single incident can affect connectivity across multiple regions at the same time, a risk no cable owner can offset alone.

The two corridors mark two of the risk points, and the third is a paperwork problem. Slow timelines for processing permits mean slow repair times. Global repair response times have more than doubled in the past decade, from under 20 days in 2012 to over 50 days in 2024, according to ICPC data cited in the report. In Egypt, a March 2024 incident left a pan-African operator waiting up to eight weeks for permits before repairs to its damaged Red Sea cable could begin, which were eventually completed that July.

The paperwork delay came at a cost no one can quantify. We spoke to industry sources who declined to name a specific USD cost tied to the Egypt-based delay. The report cites a comparable 2024 incident off West Africa, where a single cable cut cost one country an estimated USD 590 mn in losses in just four days, driven by the collapse of e-commerce platforms, digital banking, and international business communications. If four days did that kind of damage, an eight-week permitting delay in a corridor carrying 90% of Europe-Asia traffic is a balance-sheet problem nobody has priced yet.

The cost of routing around Egypt is exactly why no operator does it. The report puts the “diversity premium” — the added cost of routing a secondary cable along an alternative geographic path — at 15-25%, driven by the need to bypass existing landing stations and build new terrestrial infrastructure. More than 80% of new investment continues flowing into established routes.

Concentration is a strategy until it’s a vulnerability, and Egypt is trying to manufacture its way into staying on the upside. Egypt has been working to improve its digital infrastructure, including expanding its subsea cable capacity. Then-ICT minister Amr Talaat told EnterpriseAM in March 2025 the state spent roughly USD 6 bn building “strong infrastructure,” but ministry data shows that figure isn’t for subsea cables specifically. It also covers fixed internet coverage, mobile network buildout, and postal system development more broadly.

Whatever the exact split, the buildout hasn’t slowed. The number of subsea cables passing through Egypt rose to 21 in 2025 from 13 in 2018, Talaat previously told us. Landing stations have grown to 11 from six, and the government has linked the country’s two coasts through a 2.7k-km cross-border terrestrial network, backed by a parallel 2.6k-km network, to keep service running if one line goes down, he added.

Local connectivity and internal infrastructure are the real value drivers, former Benya Cables CEO Mohamed Khalil tells EnterpriseAM. The links between landing points and data centers are what let a country move “from a transit point to a hub,” he says. Localizing cable manufacturing is part of that pitch, and it’s now underway: Elsewedy Electric is building a USD 500 mn subsea cable factory, as we reported earlier, in the newly announced Damietta Port zone — the first facility of its kind in the region and only the sixth in the world.

This is where infrastructure investment intersects with digital sovereignty. Sovereignty does not mean isolation, Mohamed Hegazy, digital legislation consultant and former head of the ICT Ministry’s legislation committee, previously told us. It means having the local capacity to maintain and develop systems by owning the talent, code, and products needed to avoid exposure to sudden external decisions to suspend services, he said.

Striking a balance between global scale and local control is what foreign investors are watching for. Microsoft Egypt General Manager Mohamed Qassem tells EnterpriseAM that the company’s cloud strategy is built around offering the “global scale” of cloud services while giving institutions “full local control” over their data to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

What’s next: The ITU report’s fix is a single point of contact (SPOC) to speed up repair permits and reduce barriers facing cable-repair vessels. Other countries have already proven the model works: Singapore’s Maritime and Port Authority cut repair permitting from about a week down to three to five working days, and the UK now averages eight days to start repairs against the global average of 50 — both through the same SPOC approach the report is recommending for everyone else. Cairo hasn’t adopted it yet, as far as we can confirm.

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