PARIS, France: Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has announced plans to lay an undersea cable spanning five continents to enhance global data transmission, including for artificial intelligence development.
The tech giant said Project Waterworth will be the world’s longest underwater cable project when completed. The cable will run for more than 50,000 kilometres (31,000 miles) between the US, South Africa, India, Brazil and “other regions”, Meta wrote in a blog on Friday.
Global digital communication relies on a vast network of undersea conduits, with roughly 1.2 million kilometres of cable already installed, according to a 2024 report by the US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
The links can be short hops between countries or globe-spanning systems linking multiple continents.
Each is made up of multiple pairs of fibre-optic cables in an armoured sheath that may be buried several metres under the sea bed for protection.
Sub-sea cables have become increasingly important as they provide the means to power a variety of digital services and transfer data worldwide at speed.
Data-hungry digital giants like Meta have in recent years muscled into the world of subsea cables that was once the province of dedicated telecoms providers.
Meta said its latest cable project represented a “multi-billion-dollar, multi-year investment” — a relative drop in the bucket compared to the sector’s tens of billions annually in planned artificial intelligence investments.
Project Waterworth
Google and Meta’s pushes, whether joining cable-building consortiums to part-own new infrastructure or going it alone, have been especially intensive given the vast appetite for data of their platforms like YouTube, Facebook or Instagram.
The new “Project Waterworth” cable will be Meta’s third as a sole owner, according to Telegeography’s listings — well behind Google with 16.
Meta’s first cable, “Anjana” linking the US and Spain, is set to come online early this year.
“Waterworth” is named for a late Meta employee, Gary Waterworth, who worked for five years at the US giant after a career largely spent at Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN).
The French cable-laying firm is one of only a few worldwide capable of installing the hardware, alongside America’s SubCom, Japan’s NEC and China’s HMN.
Every year brings around 200 incidents of damage to cables that could otherwise endanger great swaths of economic activity.
Those can stem from natural causes like underwater landslides and tsunamis, or human ones like dragging ship anchors or fishing equipment.
AI stoking data traffic
The Facebook owner also said the cable project would provide “the abundant, high-speed connectivity needed to drive AI innovation”.
“AI is the hottest issue in the industry right now,” Alan Mauldin, research director at specialist data firm Telegeography, said, although its impact on demand for cables and bandwidth remains unclear.
“Training” new AI models could require piping large amounts of data quickly to the sites of computing clusters around the globe, he noted, while AI inference — its actual responses to users’ prompts — will also have transmission requirements.
“A lot of companies could be emerging in this space, but the big companies, the big hyperscalers seem to have a really big advantage” with existing data centres and networks, Mauldin said.
He pointed to the examples of OpenAI — massively backed by Microsoft, another player with stakes in undersea cables — and Anthropic, backed by Google and Amazon. – Agencies
