In the late 1990s, telecom companies

spent billions laying fiber optic cable

across the ocean floor to connect

continent to continent. Companies like

Global Crossing and 360 networks were

going to create the backbone of the

internet age. And then by 2002, they

were bankrupt. The cables they built are

still laying on the ocean floor. We're

actually using them right now. But every

dollar investors put into those

companies gone. Now Google, Apple, Meta,

and Amazon are doing the same grift, but

this time they're spending $15 billion,

and they're doing it for AI. The

question is, are we watching the same

movie again? But before we get into

that, you need to understand what

happened the last time companies

proposed wiring the ocean floor for a

technology that was going to change

everything. It's misleading to think

that the internet lives in the cloud. It

doesn't. It actually lives on the ocean

floor. In fact, about 95 to 99% of

global internet traffic travels through

undersea cables, not satellites, not

anything else through these cables.

There are more than 400 active submarine

cables worldwide carrying voice data,

financial transactions, government

communications, and we have a really

good map of them here. This is by a site

called submarinecablemap.com.

You can see that this is a massive

enterprise that connects continents. So

these cables are basically fiber optic

strands and they come on shore at

various terminuses. In the US we have

stations in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

as well as Virginia Beach, a bunch of

other ones. But a vast majority of these

undersea cables are now privately owned

and operated. Let's talk about the men

who died on this hill before the current

tech giants took a stab at it. One

company, Global Crossing, I've never

heard of it. You probably haven't either

because they're bankrupt. They raised

3.2 2 billion. This is late '90s money.

3.2 billion, okay? Via stock offerings

and bonds. They laid 100,000 route miles

of fiber across 27 countries. And then

they filed bankruptcy on January 28th,

2002. That's not even the biggest fall

from Grace. You have 360 networks. They

went from a $13 billion market cap to

bankruptcy in about 12 months. So, they

speed ran it. WorldCom, the shadyiest of

these, did 11 billion in fraudulent

accounting to hide the fact the demand

wasn't there. Does that sound familiar?

So, of course, they went bankrupt. And

at that time in 2002, it was the largest

bankruptcy in US history. The

infrastructure survived, the companies

didn't, and investors got wiped. The

thing is that everyone was so sure that

the demand would be infinite, nobody

stopped to check the math and ask basic

questions. Enter our new tech overlords.

Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft

accounted for less than 10% of undersea

cable capacity when they first got into

the game. Today, that number is over

70%. They own a stark majority of the

undersea cables connecting our internet.

That doesn't look like organic growth to

me. It looks like a hostile and

intentional takeover. So you have the

old model where telecom consortiums, a

group of these companies would get

together and they would build the

undersea cables and that I think

provided a lot of benefits because you

had multiple people governing over who

gets to use the cable for what, how much

we sell bandwidth for. It was some good

free market capitalism and you couldn't

do anything too shady because you're

working with a larger group of other

people. It's more observable by more

people. But then Google started to buy

consortiums in 2008 between 2008 and

2010 and they started building sole

ownership cables which was new at the

time. So they would build their own

cable, no other owners. It's just their

cable. Then Meta started to get in on

this. And so you have these legacy

telecom providers starting to the

percentage share of all the cables they

they own is decreasing while these tech

giants are starting to gain a monopoly

and over control of new cables and

existing cables. And in 2017, our new

tech giants started to surpass the

telecom companies that previously

dominated this space. I wish this was a

simple villain story, but it's really

not. The new tech giants push the

internet to go faster and to broadcast

more information. One of the reasons

that we were able to high bandwidth

share things between countries, between

continents across the planet right now

is because of a lot of the innovations

that came with this private ownership of

new cables. the capacity and bandwidth

of these communications scaled

massively. One, because there were more

cables all of a sudden when you had

private companies building them, but

also because the technology that Amazon,

Microsoft, other companies were able to

bring to the table was so far beyond

what the telecom companies were doing.

So while you might not think of someone

like Google is a proper hardware

company, they are deeply leveraged into

the hardware game. We are talking this

is planetary scale vertical integration

where you own everything from the pipe

that the internet runs through to the

web hosting to the websites and services

that run on it. It is everything all the

way down to the hardware. And it's a

tempting model to think that you're

watching this video because it's going

through an undersea pipe, which is

partially correct. But an undersea pipe,

if you're on another continent, it's not

connecting my computer to your computer.

It's connecting a data center on your

continent to a data center in my

continent. So these cables connect data

center to data center, not computer to

computer. That's an important

distinction because what are they using

the data centers for? AI development,

training, and proliferation. Things have

really started to jump the shark

recently when we're talking of undersea

cables. Meta just announced they're

spending $10 billion to build one of the

longest undersea cables in history,

which you could say, fine, they've been

up to this sort of thing before. What's

the big deal? They're just making it

longer. A lot longer. In fact, it's over

40,000 km of fiber. But here's the

messed up part. Meta will be the owner

and operator, but they will also be the

sole user of this cable. That's private

internet. Code name for this project is

project water. It's connecting US to

India, South Africa, and Brazil. So,

it's a multi- terminus project. The

cable route deliberately skips Europe

and the Middle East. And straight from

Meta themselves, you have Kevin

Salvadori, Meta's VP of network

infrastructure, saying explicitly, AI is

increasing the need for subc

infrastructure. So there, there you go.

It's not a conspiracy theory. I'm not

grasping its straws. They are building

more of these cables and they are

building them at higher bandwidth to

connect data centers to enable AI. Total

subse cable investment projected to hit

15.4 billion by 2028. That's up from 900

million in 2023. That's a 17x increase

in just 5 years. Initially, part of this

was a consortium cable, but there was a

conflict in the Red Sea obviously, which

delayed that. Uh, that cable's name was

to Africa, like the number two. So, Meta

just decided, yeah, we'll we got enough

money, we'll just go solo on this. We

don't need anybody else to participate.

This is the same AI capex story that

Wall Street is sick of that has the

market obliterated over the past few

weeks, but it's underwater and it's

global. There's also a huge national

security problem with this. In fact, in

July 2025, three House committee chairs

sent letters to the CEOs of Google,

Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon with a

simple question. They said, "Hey, hey

guys. Hey guys, we we don't have access

to those cables because you you own them

and you actually have all the power and

we've given you all that power as a

private corporation to own those cables

and uh see all the data going through

them if you want to." So, and just

asking, you know, if it's not too much

trouble, just asking. Just asking. Is

China maintaining any of those that

American data runs through? As of today,

as of me recording this video, we still

don't have a straight answer, which to

to me seems a bit like a red flag

national security crisis. But I'm just a

dude. What would I know? But every time

I cover AI spending, there's at least

one person in the comments, usually a

handful, that's saying something like,

"But they're not building real

infrastructure. This is different than

the dotcom boom. They're building real

things. Let's talk about that because as

you've seen in this video, the dot boom

was only possible because of hardware

companies building real physical

infrastructure. Those internet cables,

those bankrupt internet companies that I

mentioned earlier on, the miles and

miles of fiber optic cable that they

built, deployed, and wired up, in fact,

they're so real that we're still using

them today, right now, actually. So you

have yet another situation where the

infrastructure was real, the business

case was not real and investors were the

ones that got burned. And the difference

here from the dot era is when those

backbone of the internet companies went

bust. Internet consortiums worked

together to buy those cables. You have

multiple points of failure. If you had

five companies owning a cable, you would

have to get buyin from five people to

say, "Let's do something bad with

people's data with those cables." I'm

not saying it's not possible, but I'm

saying it is far more likely than if you

have a single point of failure if

Zuckerberg is like, "Let's do something

bad with people's data coming through

those cables. All he needs to sell are

his investors, which are incentivized to

enable him to do things that exploit

user data." So, this is a massive

monopoly. Even if AI goes to ground

tomorrow, we have another AI winter,

those cables will still exist and these

companies will 100% survive even if

there's an AI crash and they will still

own all of that infrastructure. So you

basically have the internet in just a

very short period of time going from a

public utility to like a private toll

road that you got to pay to use and obey

a whole different set of rules to run

on. Ones made not by elected officials

but by our tech overlords. So, we're out

here arguing about chat bots and talking

about LLMs, but I think the real story,

the fundamentally real story, the story

that you could actually go touch, you

could go to one of these terminuses if

you live up and down the coast, uh, on a

continent where there's a terminus, if

we look at that map, you could go to

one, you probably couldn't go in there.

I imagine they're very, very, very high

security, but you could go over there

and you could point at it. You could

point at it, and if you got past

security, you could you could touch the

building. And if you got in the

building, you could you could touch the

cable. And if you could go under the

sea, you could also touch the cable. You

could trace it all the way from

continent to continent. It's very

fundamentally real. And instead of that

being our cable, it is their cable. It

is the pipe by which that connects data

center to data center where all of the

data flows from continent to continent.

And they control it. They can see the

ingress and egress of all data at that

terminus point. So the capex isn't as

big of a story. It's 15 billion compared

to what they're projecting, which is

like 600 billion last figure for data

center buildout across these major tech

companies. But it is the power play. So

for my money, this is one of the real

power plays of the AI boom or bust or

bubble pop that's going on now that

people just are not talking about. But

it's a huge threat to our national

security, especially when you consider

how involved China might be in these.

And even apart from that, our tech

overlords have total control of this

data and nobody is talking about it. I

track big tech's AI spending every

quarter. I stay on top of these numbers

and the call has come in the comments to

share this research with you, which is

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