With Houthi forces holding Yemen's side of the Bab al-Mandab strait, cloud giants are paying several times the going rate for land routes across Turkey and Iraq, because more than 90% of Europe-Asia data runs under that 32-kilometre-wide gap.
More than 90% of data capacity between Europe and Asia runs under the Red Sea. Its entrance is Bab al-Mandab, a strait between Yemen and Africa that is less than 32 kilometres wide at its narrowest.
In September, the Houthis seized Yemen's side of that strait, including the island of Mayyun. Who controls the water now is anybody's guess.
Three times the price for one cable
In September Google bought two fibre strands running along Turkish state pipelines. Long-distance fibre is normally paid for once, up front, covering fifteen years or more. Google paid two to three times what a new line across Turkey is expected to cost.
Microsoft says it will spend more than $400 million on subsea and land links across the Middle East by 2030. Iraq signed a contract with Qatari telecoms firm Ooredoo to carry data to Europe underground from its southern port of Al-Faw.
Google and Meta have already moved some live traffic onto a land route through Iraq that used to sit in reserve.
Hard to fix, impossible to reroute
When a subsea cable breaks, repair ships need permits and safety guarantees before they will go in the water. The last time cables were cut in these waters, repairs took months.
Switching to another subsea cable does not help, because almost all of them squeeze through the same narrow gap. As one researcher put it: you can have capacity on multiple cables, but if they all run through the same tight stretch of water, your route resilience is not looking so resilient.
Cloud companies had hoped Yemen would settle down. Now they are increasingly treating the situation as the new normal.
Why it matters
Cloud computing sells the illusion that data lives up in the sky. In practice it lies under a few narrow waterways that anyone with a missile can close. Once land backups are actually switched on, the cost lands in everyone's cloud bill — which is how regional conflicts end up showing up as a price rise for ordinary users.
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