KT Warns Submarine Cable Capacity Gap Hinders South Korea's AI Data Center Goals
KT executive states South Korea's planned 18.4GW AI data centers require ~1700Tbps international bandwidth, but only 200Tbps is planned, urging public-private expansion.
Jeon Myung-jun, head of Enterprise Services at Korean telecom giant KT, stated at a National Assembly symposium on "Gangwon AI Infrastructure Hub Strategy" that current submarine cable infrastructure is insufficient to support South Korea's ambition to become a global AI hub, despite the government's plan to build 18.4GW of AI data centers (AIDCs) by 2035.
According to KT's estimates, each 1GW of AIDC generates approximately 91Tbps of traffic, meaning the 18.4GW target would require about 1700Tbps of international transmission capacity. In contrast, the submarine cable capacity operational or planned through 2030 is only around 200Tbps, leaving a deficit of over 1500Tbps. Jeon emphasized that without adequate export channels, large data centers would remain mere "warehouses."
As AI usage shifts from training to inference, the demand for real-time data exchange has increased, highlighting the importance of international connectivity. South Korea currently operates only 8 global submarine cables, far fewer than Japan's 43 and Singapore's 34. Jeon proposed forming a public-private consortium involving telecom operators, tech giants, financial investors, and the government, along with diversifying landing station locations, to address this bottleneck.