Facebook’s parent company is planning to lay over 40,000km of cable under the sea at a cost of billions of pounds, it has been reported.
The fibre optic cables will be long enough to go around the whole world, allowing the tech giant Meta to keep up with the vast amounts of data required to handle its social media platforms and AI investments.
TechCrunch said sources close to Meta had confirmed the plans to them this weekend. In a first for the company, it would be the only owner and user of the underwater cable.
Entrepreneur and tech expert Sunil Tagare was the first to report the project, saying it would be ‘one hell of a cable that will shock the world’, with a budget starting at $2 billion but potentially reaching over $10 billion.
Meta already has a huge internet cable project in the works, the 2Africa cable, which aims to deliver ‘seamless connection between Africa and Europe’.
However, it is a partner on this rather than the sole developer, with Vodafone and Orange also buying in.
Plans for its own cable are said to be in the early stages, with the physical components not yet ordered as bosses work out how it will work and where it should go.
But Meta is expected to confirm its existence and expected route in early 2025.
After Google, the company is already the world’s second biggest driver of internet traffic, mainly coming from Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, with over a billion users.
Outside of the US, its biggest user base is in India, and this cable will particularly serve India, Sunil said.
He claimed it had been dubbed the ‘W’ for the circuitous route it would take from the US East Coast to South Africa to India and then back to the West Coast of the US via Australia to power and restore.
With cables vulnerable to attack or disturbance from shipping, it will avoid potential geopolitical risk areas in the Red Sea, the South China Sea, and Egypt.
‘I assume the first equipment to be lit in the 2029-2030 timeframe,’ Sunil claimed.
Meta is far from the first tech company to go undersea to protect its business.
Underwater cables are the internet’s backbone, carrying 99% of the world’s data traffic meaning that ‘the cloud’ is actually under the sea with major investment from companies including Microsoft and Amazon.
In the UK, Google’s Grace Hopper cable came online in 2022, connecting New York with Bude in Cornwall at a distance of over 6,000km. It was billed as having capacity to handle 17.5 million people streaming 4K video concurrently.
The company owns several other massive cables outright, and has moved more towards this and away from operating them collaboratively, to have more control of their infrastructure.
Watch this space to see if yet another Google cable appears connecting the same route Meta is said to be taking.
Meta has been contacted for comment.
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