CAPACITY
CONNECTION
EDITION FOUR: DYNAMICS OF THE SUBMARINE CABLE BANDWIDTH MARKET: EFFECTS OF THE EMERGENCE AND GROWTH IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BY JOHN MAGUIRE
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Edition Four of Capacity Connections. Over the past few editions, we have traced the technical and commercial history of submarine cables and have drilled down from an overall historical point of view, identifying how some technological, regulatory and commercial developments affected the market and, most recently, on the effects of cloud computing and data centers. In this edition we delve a little deeper—although I’m not sure with any improved resolution—into the matter of artificial intelligence and its possible effects on the submarine bandwidth market. Interestingly, while artificial intelligence is the hot topic of the moment, and while there are clear impacts that arise because of it, including in the market for submarine cables and bandwidth, most of the effects play out under-the-hoods of the hyperscalers who generate so much of the activity.
SETTING THE SCENE
Artificial intelligence (AI) is headline news across the spectrum of human endeavor. It has burgeoning application in financial markets, medicine, pharmaceuticals, energy, retail and, of course, in cloud computing and telecommunication networks… There is a long list. But what is AI? For our purpose, we really need only consider AI as that range or spectrum
of machine performed activities from machine learning (where devices use real-world feedback internally to improve their performance of some defined tasks) through deep learning1 (using neural networks), through application of natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLM) that we may be familiar with in customer services “bots” or helpful applications like ChatGPT, through to the esoteric probabilistic graphical models2 used in complex risk assessments and diagnostics. 1 https://www.ibm.com/topics/deep-learning
2 https://towardsdatascience.com/introduction-to-probabilistic-graphical-models-b8e0bf459812
In the context of our broad information and communication technologies (ICT) sector, AI has more than one important dimension. On one hand, AI may be used in designing networks, network traffic flows and in optimizing redundancy/protection arrangements. But at Subtel Forum, we are concerned, on the other hand, especially with how the higher order AI activities generate huge demand for compute power and consequently for data center capacity, feeding these effects into demand for international bandwidth. For as long as traffic specific to AI applications remains separately indiscernible from other traffic generated JULY 2024 | ISSUE 137 21