Meta plans to build a $10B subsea cable spanning the world, sources say | TechCrunch

Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is the second-biggest driver of internet usage globally. Its properties — and their billions of users — account for 10% of all fixed and 22% of all mobile traffic. Meta’s investments into artificial intelligence stand to boost that usage even further. So to make sure it will have reliable infrastructure to support that business, Meta is taking the pipes into its own hands.

TechCrunch has confirmed with sources close to the company that Meta plans to build a new, major, fibre-optic subsea cable extending around the world — a 40,000+ kilometer project that could total more than $10 billion of investment. Critically, Meta will be the sole owner and user of this subsea cable — a first for the company and thus representing a milestone for its infrastructure efforts.

Sunil Tagare, a subsea cable expert (and pioneer in the space, as founder of Flag Telecom), who was the first to report Meta’s plans back in October, told TechCrunch that the plan is to start with a budget of $2 billion but as the project builds out that figure is likely to go up to more than $10 billion as the project extends into years of work.

Sources close to Meta confirmed the project but said it is still in its early stages. Plans have been laid out, but physical assets have not, and they declined to discuss budget. The expectation is that Meta will talk more publicly about it in early 2025, when it will confirm plans for the cable, including intended route, capacity, and some of the reasoning behind building it. 

It would be years before it is fully operational, were the strategy to be followed through, given that the limited number of companies, like SubCom, that are capable of building out the infrastructure already have large customers, like Google, reserving its services. 

“There’s a real tight supply on cable ships,” said Ranulf Scarborough, a submarine cable industry analyst. “They’re expensive at the minute and booked out several years ahead. Finding the available resources to do it soon is a challenge.” One likely scenario could involve building in segments, he added.

The cable, when completed, would give Meta a dedicated pipe for data traffic around the world. The planned route of the cable, says sources, currently sees it spanning from the east coast of the U.S. to India via South Africa, and then to the west coast of the U.S. from India via Australia — making a “W” shape around the globe, as visualized here by Tagare:

Meta’s infrastructure work is overseen by Santosh Janardhan, who is the company’s head of global infrastructure and co-head of engineering. The company has teams globally who look at and plan out its infrastructure — and it has had some significant industry figures work for it in the past. In the case of this upcoming project, it is being conceived out of the company’s South Africa operation, according to sources.

Fiber-optic subsea cables have been a part of communications infrastructure for the last 40 years. What’s significant here is who is putting the money down to build and own it — and for what purposes. 

Meta’s plans underscore how investment and ownership of subsea networks has shifted in recent years from consortiums involving telecoms carriers, to now also include big tech giants. 

Meta is not new to the subsea game. According to telecom analysts Telegeography, Meta is part-owner of 16 existing networks, including most recently the 2Africa cable that encircles the continent (others in that project are carriers including Orange, Vodafone, China Mobile, Bayobab/MTN and more). 

However, this new cable project would be the first wholly owned by Meta itself. 

That would put Meta into the same category as Google, which has involvement in some 33 different routes, including a few regional efforts in which it is the sole owner, per Telegeography’s tracking. Other big tech companies that are either part owners or capacity buyers in subsea cables include Amazon and Microsoft (neither of which are whole-owners of any route themselves).

There are a number of reasons why building subsea cables would appeal to big tech companies like Meta. 

First, sole ownership of the route and cable would give Meta first dibs in capacity to support traffic on its own properties. 

According to its earnings reports, Meta makes more money outside of North America than in its home market itself. Having priority on dedicated subsea cabling can help ensure quality of service on that traffic. (Note: this is just to ensure long-haul traffic: the company still has to negotiate with carriers within countries and in ‘last-mile’ delivery to users’ devices, which can have its challenges.)

Meta, like Google, also plays up the lift it has provided to regions by way of its subsea investments, claiming that projects like Marea in Europe and others in Southeast Asia have contributed more than “half a trillion dollars” to economies in those areas. 

Yet there is a more pragmatic impetus for these investments: tech companies — rather than telecoms carriers, traditional builders and owners of these cables — want to have more direct ownership of the pipes needed to deliver content, advertising and more to users around the world.

“They make their money from their products being presented to end users, and they will do everything they can to ensure customer experience, whether that’s delivery of video or other assets,” said Scarborough, the analyst. “Frankly, who’s going to rely on traditional telcos anymore? Tech companies are now independent. They’ve realized they’ve got to build it themselves.”

The second is geopolitical. 

Several times in recent years, subsea cables have been taken down as collateral or direct damage from warfare. Houthi fighters, backed by Iran, are going after boats and in the process are damaging cables in the Red Sea (such as this one connecting Europe to India). This month (November 2024), Russia was suspected of cutting a submarine cable in the Baltic Sea. Just this week, another cable went down in European waters, with a Chinese ship currently getting the blame.

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 points out in his blog post that the route would avoid the Red Sea, the South China Sea, Egypt, Marseilles, the Straits of Malacca and Singapore — “all of whom are now major single points of failure.”

The FCC’s announcement this month (November 2024) that it plans to review submarine cable licensing for the first time in decades, partly due to national security and ownership of the cables, could potentially also figure as another fillip here: Meta would be the sole owner of a route through safe corridors. 

There is a possible third reason for Meta’s subsea vision, although it’s more speculative.

According to a theory of Tagare’s, it is directly related to the cable terminating in India. He believes that Meta has an opportunity to build out data center capacity in the country specifically for training and working with AI models, and the subsea cable could play a role in that effort. 

He points out that India’s cost for compute bandwidth is a fraction of the price in the U.S., and many in India have been buzzing after a recent visit by Jensen Huang: in a meeting with Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani, the Nvidia CEO talked about India building its own AI infrastructure. Reliance, among other vendors, will be using Nvidia’s Blackwell chips in future AI data centers. 

“India could become the training capital of the world,” Tagare said in an interview. He believes that Meta might well want to build AI training in the country around that infrastructure. 

AI is a big part of Meta’s infrastructure roadmap. But beyond that, India is a huge market for Meta, topping estimates as the country with the most users by far on Facebook (more than 375 million users), Instagram (363 million), and WhatsApp (536 million) and those consumers are proving to be very enthusiast for newer features like its AI tools. With robust investments being made into the data center market in the country, India still has a lot of growth potential, so this fact alone makes it logical to have added India as a landing point in the operation. 

Sources close to the project tell us that it’s too soon to say whether AI is part of the equation for Meta in this project, describing it as part of the “long tail” of considerations and possibilities, along with whether Meta would open capacity to other users alongside itself.

Meta declined to comment for this article.