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    "headline": "Norway’s Bulk pitches a $620 million Canada-to-Europe internet cable that avoids US territory",
    "description": "The Leif Erikson line would run about 4,600 km under the North Atlantic to Goose Bay, Labrador, then 1,900 km overland to Montreal, if a Canadian majority partner signs on.",
    "datePublished": "2026-10-20T19:40:00+01:00",
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            "name": "Rezilient Digital",
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    "keywords": "Canada, Internet infrastructure, Norway, Subsea cables",
    "articleBody": "Norwegian data-infrastructure company Bulk Infrastructure is hunting for a Canadian majority partner to pay for Leif Erikson, a proposed fiber-optic link that would leave southern Norway, come ashore at Happy Valley-Goose Bay in Labrador and then run overland through Quebec to Montreal. The expected bill is more than $620 million, and the route never touches US soil. Peder Nærbø, Bulk’s co-founder, has described the line as part of a “sovereign cable system” for Canada. In September the project was pitched at an investor summit arranged by the Canadian government, where it was billed as offering “direct, secure, high-capacity data transmission for AI, telecom and hyperscale markets.” The route in numbers Current plans call for roughly 4,600 kilometers (about 2,860 miles) of cable on the seabed and a further 1,900 kilometers (about 1,180 miles) buried on land, more than 6,500 kilometers in all. When Bulk and the US cable consultancy WFN Strategies started the feasibility study in October 2021, the two companies said the system would link southern Norway to Goose Bay, with a land extension back to Montreal, and would be the first transatlantic cable run entirely on renewable power. Some quick arithmetic shows the scale. Dividing $620 million by 6,500 kilometers gives about $95,000 per kilometer before any overruns, and because the budget is a floor, the real figure can only go up. Deep-sea cable weighs around 1.4 tonnes per kilometer, so the ocean leg alone would mean at least 6,400 tonnes of cable loaded onto ships. And since modern fiber can run more than 100 kilometers between amplifiers, the seabed section would need something like 45 repeaters, give or take, strung along the floor of the North Atlantic. How a cable like this carries the internet A modern subsea cable is surprisingly thin: about 25 millimeters (1 inch) across for most of its deep-water length. Inside are pairs of glass fibers, one strand for each direction. Lasers push data down them as pulses of light, and wavelength-division multiplexing lets each fiber carry many colors of light at once, each color its own channel. Light fades over distance, so the cable is punctuated by repeaters, sealed units that boost the signal using erbium-doped fiber amplifiers. They get electricity from the shore: power stations at each landing send direct current down a copper conductor in the cable, typically at 3,000 to 15,000 volts. That plumbing matters because cables, not satellites, do the heavy lifting. Subsea systems carry about 99% of data crossing the oceans, while satellites handle less than 5% of global data traffic. A single cable’s capacity is measured in terabits per second. Newfoundland has done this before Landing a transatlantic line in Newfoundland and Labrador is not new. TAT-1, the first transatlantic telephone cable, came ashore at Clarenville, Newfoundland, from Scotland and opened on September 25, 1956, with 36 telephone channels. The first fiber-optic crossing, TAT-8, followed in 1988. Leif Erikson would bring that northern geography into the fiber era with a direct Nordic connection. Why governments are interested Bulk already has strong Canadian ties: a real estate arm of Canada’s Sun Life holds 65% of the company, and several Canadian pension funds are investors. On the policy side, Canada and the European Union said after their first Digital Partnership Council meeting, held in Montreal on December 8, 2025, that they would “explore new routes of international communication infrastructure to strengthen network resilience, including in the Arctic region.” There are practical limits to what “bypass” means. Traffic that lands in Montreal can still be handed to cloud platforms, internet exchanges and data centers run by US companies, so a route that avoids American territory does not by itself avoid American networks. For an ordinary user in Toronto or Oslo, the practical gain would be one more separate path for data between North America and Europe. What still has to happen Nothing is under construction. Financing is incomplete, no customers have been announced, route surveys are unfinished and no build date has been set. The 1,900-kilometer overland section through Quebec will need environmental approvals, land access and engagement with Indigenous communities along the corridor, and Canada and the EU still have to plan and approve the project and its route. The next marker is political rather than physical: Canada and the EU are expected to endorse a statement on new subsea links between Europe, Canada and Asia at a meeting in Montreal on October 29, though no official agenda tying it to Leif Erikson has been published. Further reading Wikipedia: Submarine communications cable European Commission: EU-Canada Digital Partnership Council joint statement Image: Lonnie Hagadorn, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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