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The European Commission formally proposed barring Chinese telecoms giant Huawei from participating in the roll-out and maintenance of undersea cables linking the EU with third countries on Thursday.
The move revives a proposal first floated by former Tech Commissioner Thierry Breton in February 2024 and represents a step-change in the EU’s stance on securing critical digital infrastructure.
Breton’s successor, Finland’s Henna Virkkunen, has doubled down on prioritising the protection of subsea cables following a series of recent acts of sabotage in the Baltic Sea, which have heightened security concerns in her native country.
The existing prohibition on deploying Huawei equipment in EU 4G/5G networks “could be extended to submarine cables”, reads the Commission’s International Digital Strategy, adopted on Thursday.
While Virkkunen pushed the Submarine Cable Action Plan in February, the document merely called for reducing reliance on “high-risk vendors”—a coded term that should be understood to refer to Chinese telecom companies Huawei and ZTE.
But since ZTE is not active in the subsea infrastructure market, the Commission’s proposal to extend the ban to subsea infrastructure singles out Huawei.
To operationalise the ban, the Commission is proposing an annual EU-led conference to coordinate and review submarine cable routes, scrutinise project partnerships, and assess financing models to ensure strategic autonomy and vendor diversification.
This latest policy development comes amid already strained EU–Huawei relations following a corruption scandal implicating several MEPs, which has amped up political pressure for a hardline approach.
A formal policy change towards Huawei would be an important political step, although the Commission has de facto powers to exclude the company from undersea cable networks as these projects usually require public support from EU’s Connecting Europe Facility, which is governed by the EU executive.
Globally, the submarine cable market is dominated by four vendors: France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN), US-based SubCom, Japan’s NEC Submarine Networks, and China’s Huawei Marine Network Technologies.
(nl)
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