Waterworth: Meta wants to build the world's longest undersea cable

Meta wants to go all out with the expansion of internet infrastructure. The parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram announced the "Waterworth" project on Friday. The US company wants to build the world's longest undersea cable network "with the highest available capacity". It is to span five major continents and extend over 50,000 kilometers –, making it longer than the circumference of the earth. The starting point will be the east coast of the USA, followed by landing points in Brazil, India, South Africa and Australia. From there, it will cross the Pacific back to the United States on the west coast at the height of Silicon Valley. The first reports about the project were published last year.

"Project Waterworth will be a multi-billion dollar, multi-year investment to strengthen the scale and reliability of the world's digital highways," wrote Meta engineers in a blog post. Techcrunch magazine estimates the investment costs at over 10 billion US dollars. The system will "open up three new ocean corridors with comprehensive high-speed connectivity", Meta explains. This is necessary to drive innovation in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) around the world. The technology is considered to be particularly data-hungry. The billions of users of Meta services already account for around 10 percent of all fixed network traffic and 22 percent of all mobile traffic.

24 fiber pairs at a depth of up to 7000 meters

When it comes to the technical design, the Group wants to focus on the resilience of the project. Cables with 24 fiber optic pairs are to be used, whereas currently 8 to 16 pairs are common. The cables will be laid "in deep water" of up to 7,000 meters below sea level, it says. The company also wants to use "improved burial techniques" in "high-risk areas" such as shallow waters near the coast "to avoid damage from ship anchors and other hazards". In the Baltic Sea in particular, there have recently been repeated cable breaks, which Western observers suspect are the result of sabotage by ships from the Russian shadow fleet. Houthi rebels also attacked undersea cables in the Red Sea last year. Resilience therefore plays a major role.

Trump and Modi back Waterworth

Meta considers India's connection to be particularly important. According to the announcement, the subcontinent is already experiencing "significant growth and investment in digital infrastructure". Waterworth should help "accelerate this progress and support the country's ambitious plans for its digital economy".

On Thursday, the White House also published a joint statement by US President Trump and India's Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi following a meeting between the two politicians. An agreement on the joint development of underwater technologies as part of a defense partnership, in which Waterworth appears, appears as a cooperation project. According to the agreement, India intends to "invest in the maintenance, repair and financing of submarine cables in the Indian Ocean with the help of trusted providers".

According to analyst firm TeleGeography, Meta already co-owns 16 submarine cables. These include the 2Africa system, which encircles the continent and is the largest installation of its kind to date. Network operators such as Orange, Vodafone, China Mobile and Bayobab/MTN are also involved. Waterworth would be the first relevant project that Meta would fully control itself. According to TeleGeography, Google is involved in around 33 different relevant routes. In order to escape potential control by China, Facebook and Google are jointly building "Apricot". This is the first intra-Asian undersea cable to bypass Hong Kong.

(nie)