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Focuses more on the historical side of undersea cables, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to recommend Arthur C Clarke’s “How the World was One” which is an incredible book on the history of telecommunications infrastructure, including the history and economics of undersea cables.

I was interested to see how expensive a subsea cable was, but most of the projects are private and not disclosed and the internet is full of varying estimates. A comparable cable - MAREA (Spain to US) cost about $165M-$400M for over 4000 miles of 200 terabits per second, Now used by AWS, Facebook, and Microsoft.

That's about $185-400 per GBit (I think).

https://dgtlinfra.com/telxius-joins-trans-atlantic-dunant-ma...

https://copenhageneconomics.com/publication/the-economic-imp...

Study that was linked in TFA which lists the benefits of adding another subsea cable.

Interesting paper, but it only talks about the benefits of cables, not the cost of operating (which was the question above).