BlueOasis is developing a North Atlantic Underwater Acoustics Center on Faial that will receive data from 200 acoustic sensors positioned throughout Azorean waters. Supported by €5 million in public and private investment, the project will combine artificial intelligence, marine science and security technology to monitor the underwater environment and help protect the submarine cables linking Europe and North America.
The Atlantic has always spoken around the Azores. It speaks through whales and dolphins, through ships crossing distant horizons and through the almost imperceptible movements of machines beneath the surface. Soon, some of those sounds may become part of a vast digital listening system centered on Faial, where the Portuguese company BlueOasis is creating what it describes as a pioneering European center for underwater acoustics. Its purpose will extend from marine research and biodiversity monitoring to defense and the protection of the submarine cables upon which an increasingly digital world depends.
According to information reported by Público and subsequently highlighted by Diário Insular, the North Atlantic Underwater Acoustics Center is expected to receive information from approximately 200 acoustic sensors distributed around the nine Azorean islands. Some will be positioned on the seabed, others attached to buoys or unmanned vehicles, creating what the project describes as a permanent acoustic picture of the waters surrounding the archipelago. At the center of the system will be a supercomputer already named Octopus, which will process the immense flow of information using artificial-intelligence algorithms.
The project represents an investment of €5 million, of which €3.5 million will come from European funds through the Azores 2030 Regional Program and €1.5 million from private investment. Full implementation is expected over approximately three years. BlueOasis Director-General Guilherme Beleza Vaz told Público that it will be the only private underwater-acoustics center of its kind in Portugal and Europe, arguing that a facility of this scale does not currently exist even within European navies.
Its location gives the project particular strategic significance. The Azores lie along an Atlantic geography traversed by submarine telecommunications infrastructure connecting the United States and Europe, including cables passing through or landing in waters under Portuguese jurisdiction. These nearly invisible lines on the ocean floor carry enormous quantities of the information upon which modern societies depend. Protecting them has consequently become an increasingly important element of national and international security.
The center is intended to provide something that conventional observation cannot easily achieve: awareness of activity beneath the surface, including far from shore. “We can protect submarine cables because we are able, in areas very far from the coast or close to it, to have visibility of what is happening underwater that did not exist until now,” Beleza Vaz explained. If the acoustic network detects activity considered capable of threatening submarine infrastructure, an alert could be issued. The center is expected to cooperate with the Portuguese Navy and Air Force, with the Navy helping identify critical areas for sensor deployment and establish defense, security and cybersecurity requirements.
The BlueOasis sensors, with a stated minimum range of five kilometers, are not entirely experimental. According to the report, the technology has been tested since 2021 during REPMUS—Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping with Maritime Unmanned Systems—the major maritime robotics and unmanned-systems exercise organized in Portugal by the Portuguese Navy in partnership with NATO. BlueOasis sensors are also already operating at several locations internationally and along the Portuguese coast.
Yet the significance of the Faial center reaches well beyond military surveillance. The same underwater sound that may reveal a vessel or unmanned vehicle can provide scientists with information about whales, dolphins and other marine life. The sensor network could support biodiversity research and ecosystem monitoring while also contributing to the detection of illegal fishing and drug trafficking. In that sense, the infrastructure is being conceived as genuinely dual-use: one acoustic landscape serving science, conservation, civil monitoring and security.
The initiative also reinforces a transformation already visible in the way the Azores are understood strategically. For centuries, their importance derived from ships, ports and their position along Atlantic routes. Later came aviation and the strategic value of airspace. In the twenty-first century, another geography is emerging beneath the waves: submarine cables, autonomous vehicles, sensors, data and the infrastructure connecting continents digitally. Faial, with its long history of Atlantic communications, would now become home to a center designed to interpret this new underwater geography.
There is an almost poetic continuity in that evolution. The Azores once helped connect continents through ships and transatlantic communications; now they may help safeguard the invisible digital arteries lying across the ocean floor. And on Faial, a machine called Octopus will listen continuously to an Atlantic crowded with signals—learning to distinguish the language of whales from the movement of vessels, the ordinary sounds of the sea from those that may require attention.
The ocean surrounding the Azores has never been empty space. Increasingly, neither is its silence
Based on a story in Diário Insular-Photo from DI.