Invest1 publisher2 min readPublished
Fincantieri spends 600 million euros to expand into underwater drones, marine surveying and subsea communications
The Italian shipbuilder is taking majority stakes in four underwater technology companies. The governments and alliances that would buy seabed monitoring are still exploring how to do it.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Fincantieri said in July it would take majority stakes in four companies for around 600 million euros, covering underwater and surface drones, marine surveying and subsea communications.
- Explosions ruptured the Nord Stream gas pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea in September 2022, and investigators determined the pipelines had been deliberately sabotaged.
- Euroatlas has built an autonomous underwater vehicle, GrayShark, which its chief strategy and partnerships officer says can reach an assigned area and complete a mission without continuous human control.
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Why it matters
- decision Fincantieri is buying the drone, survey and subsea communications capability instead of building it, and committing around 600 million euros to do it.
- constraint No one is proposing to cover everything: the supplier's own concept patrols strategic areas, so governments and owners will have to decide which stretches of cable and pipe go unwatched.
- capability Because the vehicle reports a find and then waits for a human decision, one operator can oversee several patrols. Continuous cover becomes a staffing cost.
- exposure The firms that own the cables and pipelines are telecom and energy operators, and none of them appears in the reporting with a monitoring budget.
The four majority stakes work out at about 150 million euros apiece [1][1]. Set the same sum against the asset base and it shrinks fast: TeleGeography counts more than 1.5 million kilometres of submarine communications cables in service as of early 2026, so the whole purchase price comes to 400 euros a kilometre at most [2][2]. That is a scale comparison. It does not tell you what protection costs.
Who pays for the watching is the open part. Governments and military alliances are exploring ways to monitor the infrastructure, using everything from autonomous underwater vehicles to sensors attached to the cables themselves [3]. CNBC's report does not include a procurement budget or a customer contract [18]. Katja Bego, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, told CNBC that "It's the changing threat environment that's brought this to the fore" [4]. She also said: "This has been neglected for quite a long time, so it's quite a lot of catching up to be done" [5].
Bego said damage to subsea infrastructure in the Arctic and near Taiwan, alongside Nord Stream, focused governments on vulnerabilities that drew little attention after the Cold War [8].
Fincantieri's own framing puts the commercial layer at the centre of the military one. Chief executive Pierroberto Folgiero, speaking to CNBC in July, described underwater telecommunications as "the real enabler of this new ecosystem" [9]. Thales has established businesses spanning sonar, anti-submarine warfare, mine detection and autonomous underwater systems [11].
The staffing model is where the supplier case gets concrete. On a pipeline inspection, GrayShark can identify a mine-like object, report the discovery and wait for an operator to decide whether to investigate further [13]. Verineia Codrean, Euroatlas's chief strategy and partnerships officer, imagines fleets of autonomous vehicles continuously patrolling strategic areas instead of warships guarding every mile of cable [14].
Governments could turn the exploring into tenders with values attached, in which case 600 million euros bought an early position in a category that is about to be funded [1][3]. Or the demand stays at the study stage, and Fincantieri owns four consolidated businesses whose orders arrive well after the cheque cleared. On the evidence here, the party that has committed capital to the seabed is a shipbuilder. A disclosure from the asset side would settle it: a cable consortium or a pipeline operator putting monitoring into its own budget with a figure next to it.
What to watch
- Whether Fincantieri closes the four acquisitions and discloses what it paid for each stake.
- Whether a government or alliance publishes a seabed monitoring tender with a contract value attached.
- Whether Euroatlas names a paying customer for GrayShark.