Charting the Depths: The World of Subsea Cables

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Charting the Depths: The World of Subsea Cables

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Charting the Depths: The World of Subsea Cables

Charting the Depths: The World of Subsea Cables

Data may be stored in the “cloud,” but when it comes to sending and receiving data, a lot of that action is actually happening along the depths of the ocean floor.

Hidden beneath the waves, these subsea cables account for approximately 95% of international data transmission.

These maps, by Adam Symington, use information from TeleGeography to show the distribution of subsea cables around the planet.

Wired for Connectivity

It’s estimated that there are nearly 1.4 million kilometers (0.9 million miles) of submarine cables in service globally. They ensure emails, content, and calls find their way, linking colossal data centers and facilitating worldwide communication.

Currently, there are 552 active and planned submarine cables:

undersea cables active vs planned

Submarine cables harness fiber-optic technology, transmitting information via rapid light pulses through glass fibers. These fibers, thinner than human hair, are protected by plastic or even steel wire layers.

Cables usually have the diameter of a garden hose, but often with added armor near the shore. Coastal cables are buried under the seabed, hidden from view on the beach, while deep-sea ones rest on the ocean floor.

Length varies widely, from the 131-kilometer CeltixConnect cable, connecting Dublin, Ireland, and Holyhead, UK, to the sprawling 20,000-kilometer Asia America Gateway cable, connecting San Luis Obispo, California, to Hawaii and Southeast Asia:

Asia America Gateway. Image: TeleGeography

With the current technology, cables are designed to last 25 years at least but are often replaced because of damage. Nearly two-thirds of cable damage is caused by fishing vessels and ships dragging anchors.

The Bottom Line

Traditionally dominated by telecom carriers, the makeup of the subsea cable market has shifted over more recent decades. Tech giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon now heavily invest in new cables.

With data demand surging, at least $10 billion is expected to be invested in subsea cables worldwide between 2022 and 2024, driven by cloud service providers and content streaming platforms.

Even with the growth of satellites in telecom, cables still can carry far more data at a much lower cost than satellites. In fact, according to TeleGeography, satellites account for less than 1% of all U.S. international capacity.

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This article was published as a part of Visual Capitalist's Creator Program, which features data-driven visuals from some of our favorite Creators around the world.

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Visualizing AI vs. Human Performance in Technical Tasks

AI systems have seen rapid advancements, surpassing human performance in technical tasks such as advanced math and visual reasoning.

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A line chart showing AI vs human performance in various technical tasks

AI vs. Human Performance in Technical Tasks

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

The gap between human and machine reasoning is narrowing—and fast.

Over the past year, AI systems have continued to see rapid advancements, surpassing human performance in technical tasks where they previously fell short, such as advanced math and visual reasoning.

This graphic visualizes AI systems’ performance relative to human baselines for eight AI benchmarks measuring tasks including:

  1. Image classification
  2. Visual reasoning
  3. Medium-level reading comprehension
  4. English language understanding
  5. Multitask language understanding
  6. Competition-level mathematics
  7. PhD-level science questions
  8. Multimodal understanding and reasoning

This visualization is part of Visual Capitalist’s AI Week, sponsored by Terzo. Data comes from the Stanford University 2025 AI Index Report.

An AI benchmark is a standardized test used to evaluate the performance and capabilities of AI systems on specific tasks.

AI Models Are Surpassing Humans in Technical Tasks

Below, we show how AI models have performed relative to the human baseline in various technical tasks in recent years.

YearPerfomance relative to the human baseline (100%)Task
201289.15%Image classification
201391.42%Image classification
201496.94%Image classification
201599.47%Image classification
2016100.74%Image classification
201680.09%Visual reasoning
2017101.37%Image classification
201782.35%Medium-level reading comprehension
201786.49%Visual reasoning
2018102.85%Image classification
201896.23%Medium-level reading comprehension
201886.70%Visual reasoning
2019103.75%Image classification
201936.08%Multitask language understanding
2019103.27%Medium-level reading comprehension
201994.21%English language understanding
201990.67%Visual reasoning
2020104.11%Image classification
202060.02%Multitask language understanding
2020103.92%Medium-level reading comprehension
202099.44%English language understanding
202091.38%Visual reasoning
2021104.34%Image classification
20217.67%Competition-level mathematics
202166.82%Multitask language understanding
2021104.15%Medium-level reading comprehension
2021101.56%English language understanding
2021102.48%Visual reasoning
2022103.98%Image classification
202257.56%Competition-level mathematics
202283.74%Multitask language understanding
2022101.67%English language understanding
2022104.36%Visual reasoning
202347.78%PhD-level science questions
202393.67%Competition-level mathematics
202396.21%Multitask language understanding
202371.91%Multimodal understanding and reasoning
2024108.00%PhD-level science questions
2024108.78%Competition-level mathematics
2024102.78%Multitask language understanding
202494.67%Multimodal understanding and reasoning
2024101.78%English language understanding

From ChatGPT to Gemini, many of the world’s leading AI models are surpassing the human baseline in a range of technical tasks.

The only task where AI systems still haven’t caught up to humans is multimodal understanding and reasoning, which involves processing and reasoning across multiple formats and disciplines, such as images, charts, and diagrams.

However, the gap is closing quickly.

In 2024, OpenAI’s o1 model scored 78.2% on MMMU, a benchmark that evaluates models on multi-discipline tasks demanding college-level subject knowledge.

This was just 4.4 percentage points below the human benchmark of 82.6%. The o1 model also has one of the lowest hallucination rates out of all AI models.

This was major jump from the end of 2023, where Google Gemini scored just 59.4%, highlighting the rapid improvement of AI performance in these technical tasks.

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