- Meta confirms Project Waterworth subsea cable plans
- The cable will span 50,000km and reach around the entire world
- It will be the longest cable in the world – previous record holder was… Meta
Facebook parent company Meta has lifted the wraps off its plans to build an extensive 50,000km subsea cable that will connect five continents and span the entire globe.
The news comes just a few months after we first learned the company had plans to build a subsea cable network at the cost of $10 billion.
Project Waterworth, which Meta says is a multibillion-dollar, multi-year investment, will center around a cable that’s longer than the earth is round.
VP for Network Engineering Gaya Nagarajan and Global Head of Network Investments Alex-Handrah Aimé shared in an announcement the cable will become the world’s longest and that it would feature the “highest-capacity technology available.”
Project Waterworth aims to connect the US, India, Brazil, South Africa and “other key regions,” and has been described as an “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.”
It might be Meta’s biggest, but it’s certainly not its first. The company has developed 20 other cables over the years, including an extended version of its ‘2Africa’ network which was the previous record holder, at 45,000km.
The cable network, which will loop south of Africa and cut through the center of Asia and Australasia, will be laid at depths of up to 7,000m.
Besides giving Meta greater control over its network infrastructure, Nagarajan and Aimé stated that improved connectivity will help provide opportunities for technological development in countries like India, where significant growth and investment in digital infrastructure have already played out.
