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Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has announced plans to lay an undersea cable spanning five continents to enhance global data connectivity, particularly for artificial intelligence development.
The cable, named Project Waterworth, will extend over 50,000 kilometers (31,000 miles), linking the United States, South Africa, India, Brazil, and other regions, Meta stated in a blog post on Friday.
According to the 2024 survey conducted by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in the United States, global communication is facilitated by a total of 1.2 million kilometres of undersea cables. The cable system is propelled by the protection provided by the sea floor, as the fiber-optic cables are sheathed prior to being buried beneath the sea.
Despite the fact that the subsea infrastructure market was historically associated with telecommunications providers, there has been a significant increase in investments from technology titans like Meta. During an interview, Alan Mauldin, the research director at Telegeography, pointed out that, “At some point when your growth is so big and your demand volumes outweigh other people’s, you’re incentivised to invest yourself, cut out the middleman.”
Although Project Waterworth is a “multi-billion-dollar, multi-year investment” for Meta, it is a mere fraction of the annual investments in AI development, which are approaching hundreds of billions.
Strengthening Network Resilience
Meta and Google have intensively invested in subsea cables to fulfill the increasing data requirements of YouTube Facebook Instagram platforms.
According to Telegeography, a data analytics company, Project Waterworth is Meta’s third independent undersea cable, while Google owns 16 of these cables. The US-Spain connection of Meta’s inaugural submarine cable initiative, Anjana, will be operational this year.
These investments are designed to improve the resilience of global networks to disruptions. Mauldin explained, “One new big, high capacity cable doesn’t do you any good… you need to have three or four because if one goes down, two goes down, you can still route the traffic.”
Undersea cables are susceptible to damage from natural disasters, ship anchors, and fishing activities, resulting in approximately 200 annual incidents. Security concerns have increased among experts as a result of NATO’s maritime patrols in the Baltic Sea, which were conducted to investigate the potential sabotage of telecommunications and power cables.
AI Driving the Need for High-Speed Connectivity
Meta emphasized that Project Waterworth will play a crucial role in supporting AI, stating that it will provide “the abundant, high-speed connectivity needed to drive AI innovation.”
With AI playing a pivotal role in the tech industry, experts are evaluating its impact on global data traffic. Mauldin noted, “AI is the hottest issue in the industry right now.”
Large-scale data transmission operations are necessary for the development of AI models, as they are necessary for both training and the immediate response to user queries. The dominance of the primary technology corporations, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, in this field is a result of their extensive data centres and networking platforms.
As AI deployments become more prevalent, investments in the construction of undersea cable infrastructure will increase, positioning Meta and similar entities as leaders in the global digital expansion.
