Infrastructure Map
The physical backbone beneath the internet — submarine cables spanning oceans, data centers powering the cloud, and exchange points where networks converge.
Cable data: TeleGeography. Data centers: AWS/Azure/GCP official docs. IXPs: PeeringDB.
Key Facts
Over 550 submarine cables carry more than 99% of intercontinental data traffic. These fiber-optic cables are laid on the ocean floor and can span thousands of kilometers.
Tech giants like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon now own or lease significant portions of submarine cable capacity, giving them direct control over international data flows.
The top 3 cloud providers — AWS, Azure, and GCP — control over 65% of the global cloud market and operate data centers on every inhabited continent.
AWS alone operates in 33 regions with over 105 availability zones. Microsoft Azure spans 60+ regions, making it the provider with the most global regions.
IXPs are physical locations where internet networks interconnect to exchange traffic directly, reducing latency and costs compared to routing through third-party networks.
The largest IXP by participants is IX.br in Brazil with over 2,800 members. DE-CIX Frankfurt handles peak traffic exceeding 14 Tbps.
Google is the largest private investor in submarine cables, with ownership stakes in at least 20 cables. Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are rapidly expanding their undersea networks.
By 2024, content providers owned or leased over 70% of international bandwidth, up from less than 10% in 2012.
Infrastructure concentration creates single points of failure. When a submarine cable is damaged, entire countries can lose connectivity.
In 2024, cable cuts off the coast of West Africa disrupted internet access across multiple countries for weeks. Some Pacific island nations depend on a single cable.
New cables being deployed use space-division multiplexing with 16+ fiber pairs, pushing capacity past 500 Tbps per cable system.
Projects like 2Africa (Meta) at 45,000 km and Bifrost (Meta/Keppel) are reshaping connectivity in underserved regions of Africa and Southeast Asia.
LIVE DATA — Map shows real infrastructure data from API when available, with curated fallback data covering major global infrastructure.