The United States and China are competing over undersea fiber-optic cables that are crucial for international internet traffic. SubCom LLC, an American sub-sea cable company, is currently laying a $600-million cable, called SeaMeWe-6, to transport data from Asia to Europe via Africa and the Middle East. The cable will connect a dozen countries and is expected to be completed in 2025. The project was initially awarded to HMN Technologies, a Chinese company, due in part to Beijing's hefty subsidies that lowered the cost. However, the US government successfully intervened and flipped the contract to SubCom through incentives and pressure on consortium members. Undersea cables are central to the US-China technology competition as more than 400 cables run along the seafloor globally, carrying over 95% of all international internet traffic. These cables transmit everything from emails and banking transactions to military secrets and are vulnerable to sabotage attacks and espionage.