The European Commission has amended the CEF Digital Work Programme, allocating €347 million to support strategic submarine cable projects. The funding will back Cable Projects of European Interest (CPEI), strengthen the EU’s cable repair capacity, and equip submarine cables with smart capabilities. The Commission also unveiled a Submarine Cable Security Toolbox and an initial list of CPEIs as part of broader efforts to reinforce the protection and resilience of Europe’s submarine data and power cable infrastructure. These resources, including the risk assessment, toolbox, and CPEIs, were developed by the Commission together with member state representatives through a dedicated Cables Expert Group.
In 2026, two funding calls worth €60 million will support cable repair modules, alongside a separate €20 million call for SMART cable system equipment. These are sensors and monitoring components integrated into submarine telecommunications infrastructure to gather real-time ocean and seismic data. Additionally, there will be two calls for CPEI funding in 2026 and 2027, totalling €267 million.
The Commission launched a €20 million CEF Digital call to fund adaptable submarine cable repair modules that will be pre-positioned at ports or shipyards to rapidly restore services. The initiative is designed to strengthen emergency response and backbone network resilience, beginning with a Baltic Sea pilot following a surge in cable disruptions between 2023 and 2025, with expansion to other EU sea basins planned for 2026. This pilot represents the first phase of a broader EU effort covering major sea basins, including the Baltic, Mediterranean, and Atlantic, with the Baltic prioritized due to growing concerns that recent cable incidents may involve hostile activity.
Calls for proposals will be open only to public entities with an ‘emergency response’ mandate, such as those active in civil protection, national emergency response agencies, coastguards, and military navies.
The toolbox outlines six strategic and four technical and support measures to improve the security of submarine cable infrastructure, building on the October 2025 risk assessment, which identified risk scenarios, threats, vulnerabilities, and dependencies. The list of 13 CPEI areas for public funding specifies three five-year stages, up to 2040, to fund projects aimed at strengthening the resilience of submarine cables. CPEI areas will be prioritized in upcoming CEF Digital calls for proposals and will inform planning for possible funding under the next Multi-annual Financial Framework.
The measures build on the EU Action Plan on Cable Security, adopted last February by the Commission and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, following a series of incidents that exposed the growing vulnerability of cables connecting Europe.
The Action Plan, which follows the Commission’s Recommendation 2024/779 on secure and resilient submarine cable infrastructures, sets out coordinated actions across the full resilience cycle, including prevention, detection, response and recovery, and deterrence. To support implementation, the Commission established the Submarine Cable Infrastructures Expert Group, which published an EU-wide risk assessment in October 2025, including mapping and stress-test guidance.
Drawing on that assessment, the report introduces the Cable Security Toolbox, outlining mitigation measures to address identified threat, vulnerability, and dependency scenarios. It also identifies CPEIs, highlighting priority areas for public funding to reinforce the security and resilience of Europe’s submarine cable networks.
“With today’s new actions, the EU continues to demonstrate that we can quickly respond to rising threats in an unstable geopolitical environment,” Henna Virkkunen, executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said in a statement. “We now have a common approach agreed with Member States for security risks faced by submarine cables and measures to mitigate those risks and areas requiring reinforcement as a priority. We will continue working with Member States and other stakeholders to counter threats and invest in these critical infrastructures – key to our technological sovereignty and the resilience of our connected societies.”
The Cable Security Toolbox recommendations set out in the report are grouped into two categories. Strategic measures address risks from a non-technical perspective and may require increased involvement by relevant authorities. Technical and support measures address risks from a technical perspective and are primarily intended for implementation by the private sector. The toolbox is largely focused on mitigation measures under the prevention pillar of the Cable Action Plan, which aims to increase the resilience and preparedness of the European Union, while also linking to the plan’s other action areas.
The Cable Security Toolbox aims to provide a common set of recommendations to mitigate identified risk scenarios affecting submarine cable infrastructure. A draft of the toolbox was discussed with the Submarine Cable Infrastructures Expert Group last June and subsequently refined based on feedback. An updated version was agreed in principle at a Commission meeting in November. The Toolbox was finalized last month, taking into account additional feedback from the Expert Group.
The Cable Security Toolbox sets out a coordinated mix of strategic, technical, and support measures to strengthen the physical and cyber resilience of submarine cable infrastructure across the European Union, with clearly defined roles for operators, suppliers, Member State authorities, EU institutions, and international partners. The framework emphasises closer coordination between industry, Member States, NATO, and other international bodies, while calling for concrete actions, such as increasing cable redundancy through additional connections, route diversity, and landing locations, and reinforcing EU-based maintenance and repair capacity.
It also seeks to reduce exposure to non-EU suppliers, promote manufacturing facilities and stockpiles within the EU, and strengthen regulatory and administrative protections for submarine cables at national, EU, and international levels.
On the operational side, the measures focus on ensuring adequate physical and cyber protection of submarine cables and associated dry plant facilities, improving power resilience, and expanding monitoring, surveillance, and detection capabilities involving operators, suppliers, multiple EU agencies, and the European Commission. Together, the measures reflect a policy-driven approach that combines infrastructure hardening, supply chain considerations, and cross-border governance to address the growing security and resilience challenges facing critical subsea connectivity.
The toolbox also includes CPEI, which identifies priority areas to strengthen EU resilience where private investment alone may not be commercially viable. Projects in these areas may therefore require public funding from the EU and or member states to address financing gaps. Any financial support for CPEIs must comply with EU law, including the rules governing EU funding programmes and state aid, to ensure that public investment does not crowd out commercial deployments.
The scope of CPEI prioritization covers the procurement and installation of new submarine cables to reinforce network resilience in designated priority areas, as well as the development of horizontal capabilities such as enhanced maintenance and repair capacity. Future EU funding may also be directed toward monitoring systems, including distributed acoustic sensing and smart cables, to strengthen detection capabilities.
Future funding decisions will be based on the criteria set out in Recommendation (EU) 2024/779, while taking into account contextual factors such as integration with terrestrial corridors, projected data centre demand, requirements linked to high-performance computing and AI factory deployments, and redundancy needs for existing hubs. In light of evolving geostrategic, commercial, and technical developments, the Expert Group may revisit CPEI prioritization as appropriate.
Anna Ribeiro
Industrial Cyber News Editor. Anna Ribeiro is a freelance journalist with over 14 years of experience in the areas of security, data storage, virtualization and IoT.