EU backs Arctic cable to Greenland as hacked freezers expose OT risk

Brussels backs a cable that skips the US

A European Commission joint communication published on 20 October 2026 names the Pan-Arctic Cable as a European Union flagship project. The document sets out "a sovereign, secure and resilient submarine cable connection linking Greenland directly to the EU".

The proposed route would run from Europe to Greenland. It could later extend to Canada, with Japan and South Korea as a longer-term destination. That would give European carriers a path to Asia that does not cross the United States. The politics behind it are recent. A trilateral security agreement between the United States, Greenland and Denmark in September 2026 settled repeated attempts by the Trump administration to claim the territory. It also expanded US military access. Relations with European and Canadian allies have grown strained. Trump initiated trade wars and took an increasingly pro-Russia stance on Ukraine.

Why the route matters

More than 90% of communications between Europe and Asia run through undersea cables in the Red Sea, according to TeleGeography. Houthi forces have fired missiles and drones at commercial ships in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the wider Red Sea.

Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Ars Technica the link "would have seemed like not a particularly commercially attractive proposition" five years ago. She said the fact it is under consideration is "very much on trend". The EU has committed $119 million (107 million euros) to Greenland's secure communications infrastructure and the cable project.

For network planners, that leaves a promise without a schedule.

A survey ship and a cable

The physical risk is not hypothetical. Tom's Hardware reported on 3 November 2026 that a Chinese survey ship loitering near an undersea cable ignored Philippine demands to withdraw. Europe's own cable map has similar pressure points. Maintaining Red Sea routes has become riskier as the Yemeni government and the Houthi faction fight.

The same weakness on land

On land, connected equipment that keeps food cold has already turned against its owners. The Guardian reported on 2 November 2026 that retailers in at least seven European countries found refrigeration systems pushed overnight to as high as 50C (122F). Several companies confirmed hackers had hit them.

That followed an attack in France last month. Hackers seized cooling units in as many as 700 supermarkets and raised temperatures to 50C, causing fires and food losses estimated in the tens of millions of euros. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre said it was working with affected companies and that the national impact was minimal. Paul Chichester, the agency's director of operations, said the attacks were not AI-enabled and used vulnerabilities that had been "out there for a long period of time". Richard Horne, the NCSC's chief executive, called the fridge incidents the "foothills" of a larger cyberthreat.

What is still missing

Two gaps stand out. Neither the cable plan nor the freezer response has a published timetable.

The French attack involved legacy technology connected to the internet with default passwords, The Guardian reported. Horne said there are "so many vulnerabilities out there that ... you could say are waiting to be exploited". The cable plan answers a strategic question about routes through the Arctic. The freezer attacks answer a more mundane one about unpatched vulnerabilities and exposed devices.