Executive Summary:
- Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev announced at the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) Turkistan summit on May 15 that the Trans-Caspian Fiber-Optic Cable would become operational in the coming months, aligning with Kazakhstan’s target for the third quarter of 2026.
- The cable’s construction has lagged behind the physical Middle Corridor for years. AzerTelecom’s 2019 target to complete it by the end of 2021 has slipped to the third quarter of 2026 due to partner changes and joint-venture restructuring.
- If the timeline slips again, the cable will remain among regional infrastructure projects whose multilateral endorsements have outpaced their physical delivery.
The Middle Corridor’s physical infrastructure has seen consistent development over the past few years, and multi-state cooperation agreements continue to be signed. The route’s board approved a digitalization-focused 2026 work plan in Astana in April, and Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have moved to institutionalize corridor governance (see EDM, April 28, 30, June 2). The corridor still lacks digital connectivity and a customs data layer, however, that matches the physical layer’s scale.
The May 15 Organization of Turkic States (OTS) informal summit in Turkistan placed that gap at the center of its agenda (OTS, May 15). Speaking at the summit, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev told fellow heads of state that the Trans-Caspian Fiber-Optic Cable, the backbone of the Digital Silk Way project, would become operational in the coming months (President of Azerbaijan, May 15). The Trans-Caspian Fiber-Optic Cable Line is an approximately 380-kilometer (236-mile) submarine cable running between Sumgait on the Azerbaijani coast and Aktau on the Kazakh coast through the Caspian Sea, with a design capacity of up to 400 terabits per second (Digital Silk Way, March 4, 2025). It is being implemented by AzerTelecom in partnership with Kazakhtelecom, Kazakhstan’s national telecommunications operator, through the joint venture Caspinet B.V., registered in August 2023 with equal shareholding (Interfax, August 24, 2023). In June 2024, Kazakh Digital Development Minister Zhaslan Madiyev disclosed that the project would cost more than 23 billion tenge ($50 million) (Interfax, June 18, 2024). According to Kazakhtelecom’s 2023 Integrated Annual Report, commercial operation is planned for the second half of 2026 (Kaztelecom, 2023).
The cable’s operational purpose is narrower than the “bridge between Europe and Asia,” framing the OTS declarations. Approximately 95 percent of Kazakhstan’s web traffic transits Russian networks, and Kazakh internet service providers source roughly 80 percent of their international bandwidth from Russian operators (Adyrna, March 25, 2022; UNICEF, August 2022). Uzbekistan’s connections to the outside world are routed through Kazakhstan and then through Russia, where state control over internet traffic has tightened significantly since February 2022 (Eurasianet, October 22, 2025; Carnegie Politika, April 9; see Strategic Snapshot, May 8). Routed westward through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and the Black Sea, the Trans-Caspian cable would create the first sovereign east–west digital pathway out of Central Asia, bypassing both Russian and Chinese intermediation.
The cable’s construction has lagged behind the physical corridor for years. AzerTelecom launched the project in late 2018 with the original Kazakh partners, Transtelecom and KazTransCom. At the November 2019 groundbreaking ceremony in Aktau, the stated target was completion by the end of 2021 (OTS, November 21, 2019; AzerNews, November 28, 2019). The cable was not completed by the end of 2021, and subsequent years saw additional official agreements for the project. AzerTelecom and Kazakhtelecom signed a strategic partnership memorandum on the project in September 2022 as part of the “Digital Bridge” international technological forum held in Astana (Digital Silk Way, October 5, 2022). In August 2023, Kazakhtelecom and AzerTelecom signed an agreement to register Caspinet B.V. (The Astana Times, August 24, 2023). A construction agreement was signed in March 2025 in the presence of the Azerbaijani and Kazakh prime ministers (Submarine Networks, March 6, 2025). The Desktop Study, a pre-engineering analysis of the marine environment and cable route, was completed in May 2025 (Report.az, July 7, 2025). A survey vessel departed the Kazakh port of Bautino in August 2025 to begin seabed mapping (Developing Telecoms, August 8, 2025). The pandemic, the 2020 oil price collapse, and subsequent geopolitical disruption have been cited as causes of organizational and financial delays (Caliber.az, September 29, 2025).
Madiyev confirmed in a year-end briefing in December 2025 that the official launch of the cable is scheduled for the third quarter of 2026 (Qazinform, December 26, 2025). Aliyev’s Turkistan formulation, “in the coming months,” aligns with this timetable but does not specifically reaffirm Madiyev’s third-quarter target.
Turkmenistan occupies a distinct position within the same framework. The Trans-Caspian project includes a planned second-phase cable on an Azerbaijan–Turkmenistan route, which would extend the sovereign east–west pathway and add redundancy to the first phase’s line (Submarine Networks, March 6, 2025; Digital Silk Way, accessed June 4). Despite holding OTS observer status at OTS, Turkmenistan did not send senior leadership to the Turkistan summit (The Times of Central Asia, May 18). Ashgabat’s permanent neutrality doctrine, formalized by a UN General Assembly resolution in December 1995, has historically translated into a preference for bilateral over collective frameworks. Accordingly, the second phase’s segment will proceed through the Azerbaijan–Turkmenistan Joint Intergovernmental Commission rather than through OTS declarations (Digital Silk Way, accessed June 4). The second phase’s pace will indicate whether Ashgabat treats the cable as a commercial diversification project or as a politically constrained one.
Aliyev’s broader Turkistan framing, that the Turkic world “must transform into one of the influential geopolitical power centers of the 21st century,” was accompanied by a substantive set of operational proposals (Euronews, May 17). He also reiterated that the Zangezur Corridor, dubbed the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) at the August 2025 summit in Washington, “will become one of the key segments of the Middle Corridor.” He highlighted the OTS-developed “e-Permit” system, which enables the automated issuance of electronic transit permits across member states (President of Azerbaijan, May 15). Aliyev spoke from a position of infrastructure in the construction phase. Erdoğan’s parallel emphasis on a Turkish Large Language Model and a common Turkic alphabet remained at the proposal stage (Daily Sabah, May 18). The fiber-optic cable, the e-Permit system, and TRIPP collectively constitute the digital and customs-governance layer that the Middle Corridor still lacks to reach the reliability threshold required by major logistics operators and insurers.
That layer’s materialization also depends on factors the cable alone cannot resolve. Central Asia’s data-center capacity remains structurally limited. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan together account for just over 4,700 racks, and only 15 facilities are certified to Tier III standards by the Uptime Institute (Carnegie Politika, April 9). The relationship between the cable and the regional data-center deficit is sequential rather than parallel. Without a sovereign east–west fiber route, additional Central Asian data-center capacity would still depend on Russian-controlled networks for international transit. The Trans-Caspian Fiber-Optic Cable Line is therefore the precondition that makes subsequent regional data-center buildout meaningful. The cable does not, by itself, close the corridor’s reliability gap, but it unblocks the investment cycle that can.
The third-quarter 2026 commissioning should take place shortly before the 13th OTS Regular Summit in Türkiye, where Ankara will assume the chairmanship. If the cable enters service on schedule, it will become the OTS’s first major submarine infrastructure asset on the digital corridor, distinguishing the organization from its previous role as an endorser of bilaterally developed plans. If the timeline slips again, the cable will remain among regional infrastructure projects whose multilateral endorsements have outpaced their physical delivery. For Baku, the distinction matters. The Digital Silk Way’s strategic value lies less in its declared capacity than in whether Caspinet B.V. lays cable on the Caspian seabed before the next OTS chairmanship cycle reshapes the organization’s digital agenda.
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