If you read the article you would see that they are one of a number of partners. The project costs several billion US$. By 'buying in' like this you are given a dedicated portion of the bandwidth to use.
Facscinating, so now I'm completely confused. If they can pull this cable for 300M$US total that is a huge improvement in costs from previous efforts. Now I feel compelled to track down what changed that made this an order of magnitude less costly to do.
You're right. The press release [0] does say "The total amount of investment for the FASTER system is estimated to be approximately USD $300 million". That would, however, make the title of this article wrong.
I'm surprised Techcrunch made that big a mistake in their reporting.
While manufacturing the cable is expensive, actually laying it (in that particular part of the ocean) is not that challenging. They essentially just drive a ship along that path while slowly spooling out the cable from the rear. They have the advantage that that stretch of ocean doesn't contain much of anything to plan around.
It does, especially in comparison to the other number referenced in the article. Running a cable from Singapore to Japan cost $400mm, but running one from America to Japan costs $300mm?
The Southeast Asia-Japan cable links 8 countries, not just Singapore to Japan, and is nearly as long, with options to extend the total span to longer than the Japan-US cable.