New technology giant Meta is planning a colossal, ambitious project: to build a new, undersea fiber optic cable that will span the globe – a 40,000+ kilometer project that could require an investment of over $10 billion. Meta will essentially be the sole owner and user of this undersea cable — a first for the company, and therefore a milestone for its infrastructure efforts.

Sunil Tagare, an expert on undersea cables (and pioneer in the field, as the founder of Flag Telecom), who first reported Meta’s plans in October, told tech site TechCrunch that the project has an initial budget of $2 billion , but as it continues that amount is likely to rise to more than $10 billion as it will take years.

Sources close to Meta confirmed the project, but clarified that it is still in its early stages. Plans have been drawn up, but they declined to discuss the budget. The expectation is that Meta will speak publicly about the project in early 2025, going into details such as the intended route, capacity and the vision behind its construction.

The cable, when completed, would give Meta a dedicated bus for moving data around the world. The cable’s planned route, according to sources, runs from the US east coast to India through South Africa and then to the US west coast from India through Australia – making an imaginary “W” shape around the globe. such as pictured here by Tagare:

Submarine fiber optic cables have been part of the communications infrastructure for the past 40 years. What matters here is who pays to build and own it — and for what purposes.

Meta’s plans highlight how investment in and ownership of undersea networks has shifted in recent years from being the exclusive domain of consortiums that include telecommunications operators, to the purview of large tech giants.

Mark Zuckerberg’s group, however, is not new to the undersea… game. According to telecommunications analysts Telegeography, Meta is a part owner of 16 existing networks, including the latest 2Africa cable that circles the African continent (other participants in this project are operators such as Orange, Vodafone, China Mobile and Bayobab/ MTN).

However, this new project will be the first to be entirely owned by Meta itself.

That would put Meta in the same category as Google, which is involved in about 33 different networks, including some regional efforts in which it is the sole owner, according to Telegeography. Other major technology companies that are either partial owners or purchasers of capacity on undersea cables are Amazon and Microsoft (neither company is the sole owner of the network).

Because Meta wants its own cable

There are two main reasons why major technology companies like Meta would be interested in building undersea cables.

First, sole ownership of the track and cable would give Meta the ability to support the needs of its own platforms (Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook among others).

According to its financials, Meta makes more money outside of North America than in its own home market. Prioritizing dedicated submarine cabling can help ensure quality of service in this traffic.

Meta, like Google, also points to the growth it has brought to various regions through its subsea investments, claiming that projects such as Marea in Europe and others in Southeast Asia have contributed more than “half a trillion dollars” to the economies of these areas.

The second reason is geopolitical.

Many times in recent years, submarine cables have been cut as a collateral or direct casualty of a war. Houthi fighters, backed by Iran, are hunting ships and destroying cables in the Red Sea (like the one connecting Europe to India). This month (November 2024), Russia was suspected of cutting an underwater cable in the Baltic Sea. In the past week, another cable was cut in European waters, with a Chinese ship currently being reported as “the suspect”.

The route as envisioned by Meta is intended to help the company “avoid areas of geopolitical tension,” a source close to the company told TechCrunch.

Tagare notes in his blog post that the route will avoid the Red Sea, the South China Sea, Egypt, Marseille, the Straits of Malacca and Singapore.