Cascade

2 corrections · latest May 19, 2026Fresh10d

If a node, region, or supply-chain layer fails, what stops — where, and how fast. A quantitative propagation model that walks the supplier–customer graph one edge at a time, weighting each hop by trade-flow share, editorial replaceability, and the stock-price correlation between coupled firms. The Engine runs any disruption you build; Scenarios pins it to named geopolitical stress cases, each carrying its own dated threat analysis.

Cascade

2 corrections · latest May 19, 2026Fresh10d

South China Sea: Cable Chokepoint Disruption

Scenario · Cable chokepoints

Analysis · reviewed 2024

Submarine cable corridors carry the cross-region traffic that AI training runs spanning Asia and Europe depend on, that US labs need to deliver inference to Asian users, that Gulf data centers use to federate with European replicas. Where those corridors narrow to single chokepoints, cable disruption stops being a submarine-cable curiosity and becomes a continuity question for AI compute.

Infrastructure Exposure Analysis

14 cable systems, 8 landing stations, 6 chokepoint zones. Cable-dependency-to-DC mapping with rerouting latency penalty modeling.Submarine cables carry 99% of intercontinental data traffic. When cables through the South China Sea and Suez corridor are disrupted, which data centers lose connectivity, and what rerouting alternatives survive?

Choose scenario

Severity

Submarine cables carry roughly 99% of intercontinental data traffic; 3 chokepoint zones (Bab-el-Mandeb, Malacca, Luzon Strait) concentrate that traffic onto a small number of routes. The Feb–Mar 2024 Red Sea event removed an estimated ~70%of Asia–Europe corridor capacity for weeks while repair was delayed indefinitely in contested waters.

Methodology →TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map · ICPC · ITU · per-cable cloud-region joins (operator-disclosed where available)

Chokepoint AnalysisPer-corridor cable inventory, latency baseline, and which cloud regions lose connectivity when the active scenario fires.6 zones · 14 cables

IncidentsFive categories of historical cable failures (sabotage, anchor-drag, earthquake, volcanic, compound) with attribution evidence.5 historical

Scenario DetailsReference cards for each rerouting scenario — affected cables, capacity loss, latency penalty, alternative-route description.4 scenarios

MethodologyCable route data sourcing (TeleGeography), latency decomposition, capacity-loss caveats, calibration against the 2024 Red Sea event.

Rerun this disruption in the engine

The engine models firm-to-firm supply propagation, not cable topology — a severed submarine cable is not an edge in the supply-chain graph. What it can run is the downstream face of a cable disruption: the hyperscalers whose cross-region service the severed corridors carry (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle) losing that connectivity, propagated through their supply chain. The cable-routing, chokepoint-redundancy, and rerouting-latency analysis on this page is the part the engine does not reach.