Meta has presented the Waterworth Project, an initiative aimed at building a 50,000-kilometer undersea cable that will provide internet connectivity in five continents. The company seeks to strengthen control over the management of its services and guarantee the necessary infrastructure for the development of its products, especially those based in artificial intelligence.
Submarine cables support more than 95 percent of intercontinental internet traffic. “Project Waterworth will be a multibillion dollar, multiyear 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,” the company said in a post about the undertaking. The project was first reported last fall by entrepreneur Sunil Tagare.
The interoceanic cable will be longer than the circumference of the Earth, making it the longest in the world, according to the company. It will have landing points in India, the United States, Brazil, South Africa, and other strategic locations. The company suggests that the construction of this network will bring significant opportunities in the AI space, particularly in the Indian market.
“In India, where we’ve already seen significant growth and investment in digital infrastructure, Waterworth will help accelerate this progress and support the country’s ambitious plans for its digital economy,” the compay’s post reads.
Last week, President Donald Trump and India’s prime minister Shri Narendra Modi issued a joint statement on cooperation between the two countries. The document includes commitments on undersea technologies and mentions Project Waterworth.
“Supporting greater Indian Ocean connectivity, the leaders also welcomed Meta’s announcement of a multibillion, multiyear investment in an undersea cable project that will begin work this year and ultimately stretch over 50,000 km to connect five continents and strengthen global digital highways in the Indian Ocean region and beyond,” the statement released by the White House said.
The new undersea network will use a cable architecture with 24 fiber pairs and routing designed to maximize deep-water routing, reaching up to 7,000 meters. Meta claims to have improved its burial techniques in high-risk areas, such as shallow near-shore waters, to reduce the risk of damage from ship anchors and other external factors.
Meta’s ecosystem, which includes services such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, by some accounts comprises as much as 10 percent of fixed traffic and 22 percent of mobile traffic globally. Over the past decade, the company has developed more than 20 undersea cables in collaboration with various partners. Waterworth would be the first project to be fully owned by the company.
With this initiative, Meta will compete directly with Google, which has around 33 undersea cable routes, some of them exclusively owned, according to the specialist firm TeleGeography. Other technology companies such as Amazon and Microsoft are also investing in this sector, although they only own shared interests or acquire capacity on existing cables.
This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.
