Meta Goes For Subsea Distance With Project Waterworth

When it comes to subsea cables, there are short ones, long ones, really long ones, and now there is Project Waterworth. Over the weekend, Meta announced its latest subsea cable infrastructure project that would span 50,000km and connect the east coast of the US with the west coast of the US, via, well, everywhere.

Ok, not everywhere – it doesn’t go to Europe or east Asia. It would stop in Brazil, South Africa, India, and northern Australia though, taking a southern route to almost circumnavigate the globe. It would avoid heavily built routes across the northern Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Malacca Strait near Singapore. In places it would sit at depths of 7,000 meters. Oh, and it will cost ‘multi-billion’ dollars.

Meta says the infrastructure will help unlock AI for all around the world. But at a more practical level, what it will do is provide infrastructure diversity between the markets of the US and India. It manages to do that while sidestepping any political complications that could arise in hot spots like the Middle East, the South China Sea, and Russia.

Beyond that, Meta isn’t sharing too many details. I’m sure plenty of those details are still just penciled in anyway, and we will learn more later as they get feedback from partners and such. The project will take years to implement of course.

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Categories: Undersea cables