Mauritania has secured a second direct subsea-cable connection to Europe.
European subsea-cable operator EllaLink and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania’s Ministry of Digital Transformation and Modernisation of Administration (MTNIMA) confirmed on 4 May 2026 that a new branch of more than 670 km had been landed in the port city of Nouadhibou. The branch connects to EllaLink’s main trunk system, the operator’s flagship Europe-to-South-America route which lands in Sines, Portugal.
Co-funded by the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility
The branch was co-funded by the Mauritanian state and the European Union through its Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme. EllaLink said the system carries two fibre pairs with state-of-the-art optical technology, delivering multi-gigabit capacity from launch and scalable to multi-terabit.
Until the new landing, Mauritania connected to international networks primarily via the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) cable, which serves the capital Nouakchott. The Nouadhibou branch gives the country route diversity and the kind of network resilience increasingly cited by African governments as a digital-sovereignty priority. Earlier this decade, undersea-cable incidents repeatedly highlighted the cost of single-route dependence for the continent.
“A full participant in the global telecommunications architecture”
“We are moving from the status of a mere recipient to that of a full participant in the global telecommunications architecture,” Ahmed Salem Bede, Mauritania’s Minister of Digital Transformation and Modernisation of Administration, said in EllaLink’s announcement.
Bede added that the connection would underpin strategic public-sector programmes including e-government, education, health, agriculture, transport and energy.
Sahel and Atlantic-corridor extensions on the table
Both partners flagged that the Nouadhibou landing could anchor regional extensions toward the Sahel and the Atlantic corridor, potentially serving inland West African markets that currently rely on transit through Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire or Nigeria.
“Together with our Mauritanian partners, we are ready to develop new services and regional extensions,” EllaLink CEO Philippe Dumont said.
The landing is the latest in a string of moves bringing African coastal markets closer to European data hubs, alongside the 2Africa, Equiano and Medusa cable systems that have come online or expanded over the past two years.
Leave a Reply