Kenya’s ICT minister Joe Mucheru gleefully welcomed the arrival of the 15,000-kilometer PEACE (Pakistan & East Africa Connecting Europe) undersea cable when it came ashore in the port city of Mombasa on Tuesday. 

The $425 million project to link Asia, Africa, and Europe by a vast undersea cable network is a central part of China’s Digital Silk Road initiative that will have landing points in Kenya, Djibouti, Egypt, and eventually South Africa. While Mucheru and most East African stakeholders eagerly await the dramatic increase in bandwidth that the PEACE cable will provide, the U.S. and some European governments are anxious about China’s increasingly expansive role in the global undersea cable market.