Mobily to Add 140 Tbps Red Sea Cable Between Saudi Arabia and Egypt

At Submarine Networks World 2026, Mobily Chief Wholesale Officer Adel Alaskah detailed plans for the Mobily Red Sea Cable, which will add 140 Tbps of capacity between Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The wholly Saudi-owned cable will connect Duba with Sharm El Sheikh, opening an east-west route toward Europe for hyperscalers, OTT platforms, and network operators.

Building Route Diversity on the Red Sea Corridor

Mobily operates four subsea gateways across two coasts to handle transit between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. In Jeddah, the carrier ties into Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1) alongside the TGN-EA and SEACOM systems. At Al Khobar on the eastern coast, it routes regional traffic through TGN-Gulf.

Northern landings handle heavier long-haul transit. Mobily serves as the domestic landing party and consortium member for the SEA-ME-WE 6 cable at Yanbu. Its Duba station hosts the Africa-1 system, which landed in 2025.

Wholesale Capacity for Hyperscalers and Asian Carriers

Asian telecom operators and cloud providers face chronic bottlenecks along traditional Red Sea transit points. Duba to Sharm El Sheikh gives international carriers a bypass path. The route runs independently of existing lines through Jeddah.

This build shifts wholesale dynamics across the Gulf. Mobily is pairing subsea landings with local data centers and domestic backhaul fiber. The goal is keeping regional computational workloads inside the Kingdom instead of losing hosting revenue to hubs in Europe or East Asia.

Sovereign Infrastructure and Regional Digital Hubs

National infrastructure targets drive the project under Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 economic program. The framework prioritizes digital sovereignty alongside non-oil commercial growth. Hyperscalers, over-the-top content platforms, and regional internet service providers need low-latency transit backed by neutral terrestrial interconnection.

Mobily pitches its four-station network as a unified gateway rather than standalone landing contracts. The strategy mirrors competing investments from Gulf operators trying to capture data flows between Singapore, Mumbai, and European financial centers.

Expanding Physical Landings Beyond Yanbu

Landing rights secured on major international consortium cables over the past decade laid the groundwork for the network. Integrating Africa-1 at Duba in 2025 provided the northern anchor point now paired with the Egyptian link.

Future capital deployments will target local data center builds, domestic fiber expansion, and sovereign artificial intelligence hosting clusters. Delivery timelines for optical activation on the 140 Tbps Red Sea span will dictate when wholesale carriers can switch active commercial loads onto the corridor.