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Telecom Italia Sparkle (TIM's international/wholesale carrier arm) is the beneficiary of a EUR 20 million CEF-Digital grant for GreenMed, a subsea fibre system crossing the Adriatic Sea to link Italy to Croatia, Montenegro, Albania and Greece, extending onward toward Turkey and the Central-Eastern Mediterranean. The system is being engineered and manufactured by Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) and installed by Elettra Tlc; first segments are expected in service by late 2028. Sparkle has since (May 2026) signed an MoU with NaiTel and iLevant to extend GreenMed through Jordan, positioning the cable as a broader Europe-Middle East-Asia digital corridor rather than a purely intra-Mediterranean link.
The grant is one of the backbone-connectivity/submarine-cable awards under the Commission's Fourth CEF-Digital Call, whose selection decision was formally adopted 3 November 2025 and publicly announced by HaDEA (the Commission's Connecting Europe Facility implementing agency, successor to INEA) on 20 November 2025. That call selected 56 projects for up to EUR 389 million combined across three categories: backbone/submarine cables, 5G large-scale transport-corridor pilots, and EuroQCI quantum- communication infrastructure. It is the same funding instrument and selection round that co-financed the Greece Wings ICT Multimodal-5G grant (2025-11-03-greece-wings-ict-multimodal-5g-cef-digital-grant) and the Ireland McMahon Design PISCES subsea-cable grant (2025-11-03-ireland-mcmahon-design-management-cef-digital-pisces-grant), both announced/effective the same day.
2025-02-21; EU Submarine Cable Recommendation 2024/779) of treating subsea digital infrastructure as strategic, EU-controlled-entity-only critical infrastructure warranting direct Commission co-financing.
Sparkle, complementing (not overlapping) Sparkle's existing BlueMed and other Mediterranean cable systems, and extending EU-financed connectivity influence toward the Balkans and eventually the Levant/ Central Asia via the Jordan extension.
awards (Greece, Ireland) as a coordinated EU push to fund cross-border and subsea digital backbone ahead of a formal call closure, rather than isolated one-off grants.
confirmed in public sources as of filing; HaDEA's 20 November 2025 announcement referenced grant-agreement signature as in progress.
only a portion, and how the later Jordan/NaiTel extension (May 2026) relates to (or is funded independently of) this CEF-Digital award.