Again in November, we broke the information that Meta — proprietor of Fb, Instagram, and WhatsApp, with billions of customers accounting for 10% of all fastened and 22% of all cellular visitors — was near asserting work on a serious new, $10 billion+ subsea cable challenge to attach up the globe. The purpose was to present Meta extra management over the way it runs its personal companies.
At present, Meta confirmed particulars of our report: Venture Waterworth is the official identify, and it is going to be 50,000 kilometers lengthy when accomplished, making it the world’s longest subsea cable challenge.
Lining up with what we had heard concerning the challenge months in the past, the community will join 5 continents, with touchdown factors in america, Brazil, India, South Africa, and different key areas. Fb notably calls out the alternatives in India, and the function that the community will play in the way it rolls out AI companies globally, as two key causes for constructing the community.
When it comes to the community itself, Meta says it is going to be breaking new floor with its structure, utilizing 24 fiber pair cables, and what it describes as first-of-its-kind routing, “maximizing the cable laid in deep water — at depths up to 7,000 meters” together with new burial methods to scale back faults in areas deemed “high risk,” both due to geographical points, or politics — and typically each.
Beforehand, we famous that geopolitics is likely one of the main components out there influencing Meta to construct its personal subsea infrastructure. That has certainly performed a job right here.
On Thursday, the White Home revealed a joint leaders assertion from U.S. President Trump and India’s Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, which detailed a prolonged checklist of areas the place the 2 international locations would cooperate. Tucked into that lengthy doc was a dedication to co-developing undersea applied sciences as a part of a protection partnership, in addition to a observe about Meta’s 50,000-kilometer Waterworth challenge, and India’s function in financing a few of it.
“Supporting greater Indian Ocean connectivity, the leaders also welcomed Meta’s announcement of a multi-billion, multi-year investment in an undersea cable project that will begin work this year,” the assertion famous. “India intends to invest in maintenance, repair and financing of undersea cables in the Indian Ocean, using trusted vendors.”
As for what the cable might be used for: In November, certainly one of our sources postulated that the expansion of AI knowledge facilities and cloud companies in India, the world’s most populous nation, was a major cause for Meta’s challenge within the first place.
Meta has declined to remark to us on extra particular particulars however in its weblog submit offered some high-level concepts of purposes and highlighted the nation and AI.
“Digital communication, video experiences and online transactions,” are among the many purposes that the subsea cable will allow, in response to the submit, penned by Meta’s VP of engineering Gaya Nagarajan and its international head of community investments Alex-Handrah Aimé. “Project Waterworth will be a multi-billion dollar, multi-year investment to strengthen the scale and reliability of the world’s digital highways by opening three new oceanic corridors with the abundant, high speed connectivity needed to drive AI innovation around the world.”
This isn’t Meta’s first subsea cable effort, neither is it the one main know-how firm to construct its personal subsea infrastructure.
In response to telecom analysts TeleGeography, Meta is a component proprietor of 16 current networks, together with the 2Africa cable that encircles the continent (others in that challenge are carriers, together with Orange, Vodafone, China Cell, Bayobab/MTN, and extra). This new cable challenge could be the primary wholly owned by Meta itself.
That might put Meta into the identical class as Google, which has involvement in some 33 totally different routes, together with a number of regional efforts through which it’s the sole proprietor, per TeleGeography’s monitoring. Different Large Tech firms which can be both half homeowners or capability consumers in subsea cables embrace Amazon and Microsoft, neither of that are complete homeowners of any route themselves.
