Saudi Arabia sets a 2030 target for more than 20 subsea cables

Saudi Arabia's communications minister, Abdullah Al-Swaha, used the opening of LEAP 2026 to set a target of more than 20 subsea cables landing in the kingdom by 2030, framed as delivering connections with latency below 30 milliseconds to more than three billion people worldwide. The figure was one line inside a wider opening-day tally that put more than $15 billion in technology investments and launches on the table at LEAP this year, and it arrived as a target rather than a contract: no operator, consortium, cable system name, route or capital commitment was attached to the pledge in the coverage of the minister's remarks. The ambition nonetheless has a real starting point. Saudi Arabia sits on two coastlines — the Red Sea and the Gulf — that between them carry a meaningful share of the traffic moving between Europe, Africa and Asia, and the kingdom has been building out its own subsea capacity rather than only hosting cables that land elsewhere. stc's Saudi Vision Cable, a roughly 1,160-kilometre system connecting Jeddah, Yanbu, Dibba and Haql along the Red Sea coast and built by Alcatel Submarine Networks, is one example already in service. Riyadh's pitch is to extend that position from a handful of systems to a network dense enough to be a genuine global crossroads rather than a single route through the region. Latency is the specific metric the minister chose to lead with, and it is the right one for the audience LEAP is aimed at. Thirty milliseconds is roughly the threshold below which most interactive workloads feel instantaneous to a user, and it is a meaningful number for anyone selling cloud regions, AI inference or real-time enterprise applications into the kingdom. Framing subsea capacity in those terms ties directly into Saudi Arabia's parallel push to attract hyperscale data centre investment: a cloud region or an AI zone is only as useful as the international bandwidth connecting it to the rest of the world, and subsea cables are the physical layer underneath every other digital-economy announcement made at the show this week, including Salam's own showcase of AI-enabled cloud and connectivity infrastructure at the same event . The plan also positions Saudi Arabia as a capital source for connectivity projects beyond its own borders, echoing investment Saudi-linked capital is already making elsewhere on the continent. Vision Invest and Africa Finance Corporation backed the pan-African operator WIOCC with $300 million at LEAP 2026 , a deal announced at the same event that points the same way: Gulf capital moving into the physical layer of connectivity rather than only the applications running on top of it. Ericsson's own LEAP 2026 showcase of 5G Advanced and AI-driven networks is a reminder that the domestic mobile network sits downstream of exactly this kind of international capacity. What is missing from the announcement is everything that would let it be checked against delivery: which of the 20-plus cables are already under contract, which are still at the planning stage, who is building them, and what a realistic 2030 build schedule for that many systems actually looks like. Subsea cable projects typically take three to five years from final investment decision to landing, which means a genuine 2030 target implies decisions on most of these systems within the next year or two — a detail the announcement did not address. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.