Meta confirms “Project Waterworth”, a global submarine cable project covering 50,000 km

Back in November, we announced the news This meta – owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, with billions of users accounting For 10% of all fixed traffic and 22% of all mobile traffic – was about to announce a work on a new underwater cable project of $ 10 billion to connect the globe. The objective was to give Meta more control over how he manages his own services.

Today, Meta has confirmed the details of our report: Project Waterworth is the official nameAnd it will be 50,000 kilometers long once, making it the longest underwater cable project in the world.

Addating that we had heard of the project months ago, the network will connect five continents with landing points in the United States, Brazil, India, South Africa and other key regions. Facebook particularly calls opportunities in India, and the role that the network will play in the way it deploys AI services in the world, as two key reasons for building the network.

In terms of network itself, Meta says that it will innovate with its architecture, using 24 cables of pairs of fibers, and what it describes as a primary routing of its kind, “maximizing the cable placed in deep water – In depth up to 7,000 meters “as well as new burial techniques to reduce defects in areas deemed” at high risk “due to geographic problems, that is to be politics – and sometimes both.

Previously, we noted that one of the main factors of the Meta influencing market to build its own underwater infrastructure was geopolitics. It has indeed played a role here.

Thursday, the White House published a Declaration of joint leaders President Trump and Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, who detailed a long list of areas where the two countries would cooperate. Nestled in this long document was a commitment to co-develop underwater technologies (as part of a defense partnership) as well as a note of the 50,000 km waterworth project of Meta and the role of India in the financing of a part.

“Supporting the connectivity of the Grand Indian of the Ocean, the leaders also welcomed Meta’s announcement of a multi-year investment of several billion in a submarine cable project which will start to function this year,” noted the press release . “India intends to invest in the maintenance, repair and financing of submarine cables in the Indian Ocean, using trust suppliers.”

As for what the cable will be used: in November, one of our sources applied that the growth of AI data centers and cloud services in India, the most populous country in the world, was an important reason for the Meta project in the first place.

Meta refused to comment on more specific details, but provided high -level ideas of applications and highlighted the country and AI in its blog article.

“Digital communication, video experiences and online transactions” are among the applications that the underwater cable will allow, according to a blog article written by the Meta engineering vice-president Nagarajan style and its global network of network investments Alex-Handrah Aimé. “Project Waterworth will be a multi -year investment of several billion dollars to strengthen the scale and reliability of global digital motorways by opening three new ocean corridors with abundant and high speed connectivity necessary to stimulate AI innovation in the whole world. “

This is not the first Meta submarine cable effort, nor the only major technological company to build its own underwater infrastructure.

According to telecommunications analysts TelegegographyMeta is partly the owner of 16 existing networks, including the 2Africa cable surrounding the continent (other members of this project are operators, including Orange, Vodafone, China Mobile, Bayobab / MTN, etc.). This new cable project would be the first detainee entirely by Meta herself.

This would put Meta in the same category as Google, which is involved in some 33 different routes, including some regional efforts in which he is the only owner, according to the follow -up of telegeography. The other large technological companies who are owners or capacity buyers in the underwater cables include Amazon and Microsoft (which are not themselves whole owners of any route).