The oceans, vast and indifferent, have never cared much for human communications infrastructure. Yet beneath their surface, they now carry the weight of nearly all global digital exchange. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has moved well past the announcement stage in its ambition to build and control a significant share of that infrastructure — and what has emerged since late 2024 is a portfolio of undersea projects whose combined scope dwarfs anything the company previously attempted.
The centerpiece is Project Waterworth, formally announced in February 2025. Once complete, the project will reach five major continents and span over 50,000 kilometers, making it the world’s longest subsea cable project using the highest-capacity technology available. Waterworth will bring connectivity to the United States, India, Brazil, South Africa, and other key regions, with the explicit aim of enabling greater economic cooperation, facilitating digital inclusion, and opening opportunities for technological development. The cable is also openly framed as AI infrastructure: subsea cables account for more than 95 percent of intercontinental traffic across the world’s oceans, and Waterworth is designed to carry the load that AI, cloud, and high-bandwidth applications will continue to impose on global networks.
Waterworth is the headline, but it is not the only cable Meta has been building. The core 2Africa system — the world’s longest open-access subsea cable — has been completed, now connecting 33 countries across Africa, Europe, and Asia and reaching more than three billion people. With the Pearls extension scheduled to go live in 2026, the complete system length will reach 45,000 kilometers. It is the first 16-fiber-pair subsea cable to fully connect Africa and the first cable to link East and West Africa in a continuous system. In the Pacific, Bifrost now connects Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the United States, with a Mexico extension expected in 2026, adding over 260 terabits per second of redundancy to a heavily trafficked route. And in October 2025, Meta announced Candle: an 8,000-kilometer system connecting Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, expected to be ready by 2028 and capable of delivering 570 terabits per second of capacity to a region that now accounts for over 58 percent of the world’s internet users.
The technical ambition embedded in these projects is not incidental. The 2Africa build required spatial division multiplexing technology supporting up to 16 fiber pairs per cable — double the capacity of older systems — along with undersea optical wavelength switching for flexible bandwidth management and a 50 percent increase in burial depth over previous systems to avoid seabed hazards. These are not upgrades to legacy infrastructure. They are a generational reset of what global connectivity infrastructure looks like and who controls it.
That question of control has taken on new urgency as the physical vulnerability of subsea cables has moved from specialist concern to front-page geopolitics. Between 2024 and 2025, researchers identified four incidents involving eight distinct cable damages in the Baltic Sea and five incidents involving five distinct cable damages around Taiwan, with at least four of those incidents linked to China- or Russia-affiliated vessels operating under suspicious circumstances. In January 2025, NATO launched a joint naval operation called Baltic Sentry with the stated aim of deterring future attempts by state or non-state actors to damage critical undersea infrastructure. In Washington, the response has moved toward legislation: the bipartisan Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2026 calls for expanded diplomatic coordination with allies, sanctions against foreign individuals responsible for intentional cable damage, and an interagency committee to coordinate national subsea cable policy.
The threat is structural as well as tactical. Over 95 percent of global data and ten trillion dollars in daily financial transactions travel across 1.5 million kilometers of submarine cables. Repair capacity has lagged dramatically behind the expansion of cable networks, meaning the growth of cable systems has outpaced the ships available to service them. For a company like Meta, which has staked its platform reliability on owning and operating its own physical routes, this fragility is not an abstract risk — it is an operational constraint that shapes every routing decision.
Going into 2026, submarine cables have become strategic infrastructure on par with energy, transportation, and defense. The race Meta is running is therefore not simply about bandwidth or latency. It is about the physical geography of information itself — who laid the cables, through whose waters they pass, who can cut them, and who can repair them. In that contest, the company that controls the route controls the conversation. Meta has made clear it intends to control a substantial portion of both.
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