It is the first submarine cable system to deploy multicore fiber technology commercially, with that technology applied specifically on its branches to Taiwan and the Philippines.
The timing of NEC’s broader expansion, a plan to invest more than 100 billion yen ($629 million) over five years to capture market share and prepare for geopolitical threats, could not be more consequential for the Philippines.
The country finds itself simultaneously a critical node in a technological breakthrough and a front-line state amid geopolitical tensions driving demand for more resilient undersea infrastructure.
Strategic Claveria
The Philippines segment of the TPU cable connects Claveria to a branching unit on the transpacific trunk, covering approximately 520 kilometers.
It carries the equivalent of 20 fiber pairs: 16 connecting the Philippines to the main transpacific segment reaching California, and 4 dedicated fiber pairs connecting the Philippines directly to Taiwan.
Those 4 Taiwan-Philippines fiber pairs are the ones carrying NEC’s multicore technology, two cores packed inside a single fiber strand, doubling the data channels without increasing the cable’s physical size.
With multicore fiber, the number of cores in the cladding is doubled, meaning it can carry more light and information at a reduced cost per bit, all within the same fiber strand.
The full system is expected to be ready for service this year. With a total system capacity of up to 260 terabits per second, it will represent a significant addition to Philippine international bandwidth.
Location by no accident
Claveria is not a random landing point. Its selection is deeply entwined with the strategic geography reshaping the Indo-Pacific.
Google’s TPU cable, landing in Claveria in the province of Cagayan, sits in a zone of growing geopolitical significance. After a 30-year hiatus, American troops returned to the Philippines under a February 2023 agreement for the use of four additional military bases in the country, including two in the province of Cagayan, located approximately 230 miles from the coast of Taiwan.
The province of Cagayan hosts both the cable and the military access points, a convergence that is anything but coincidental.
In the broader context of cable security, the Luzon Strait — the body of water that Claveria faces — and the South China Sea beneath it hold dense networks of existing undersea cables connecting Southeast Asia, China, Taiwan, and Japan. The TPU cable’s Philippine branch crosses precisely this contested maritime space, threading between northern Luzon and southeastern Taiwan.
Analysts have noted that the TPU cable could potentially thwart tactics such as severing undersea cables to Taiwan, thereby ensuring uninterrupted coordination with the United States and allied forces in a crisis.
The Luzon Strait is perhaps the most important strategic strait providing exit and entrance to the South China Sea, a critical passageway for commercial shipping and cable communications linking Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia.
Growing cable hub
The TPU system’s arrival in Claveria reflects a deliberate effort to diversify where Philippine international cables land and to shift them away from the country’s vulnerable west coast.
Existing cable landing stations are mostly concentrated in the west of the Philippines, notably in Batangas, Cavite and La Union.
The Claveria station in the north, facing the Luzon Strait, is part of a broader pattern of new landing stations being built along the country’s north and east coasts to diversify routes in response to the West Philippine Sea disputes.
By 2025, eight trans-Pacific cables had connected the Philippines to the United States, building the country’s position as an international telecommunications hub in the Asia-Pacific region.
Globe’s footprint in this infrastructure build-out extends well beyond the TPU partnership. In April 2026, Globe Telecom joined the Candle Cable System consortium led by Meta and SoftBank, an 8,000-kilometer system expected to provide up to 570 terabits per second of total capacity, directly connecting the Philippines to Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore, with NEC again serving as the system supplier.
NEC’s $636 million expansion plan directly underpins the Philippines’ digital infrastructure ambitions. The investment includes acquiring dedicated cable-laying and maintenance vessels — a capability gap that has long made NEC dependent on chartered ships for the very operations that Philippine projects require.
