Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, will lay over 50,000km of undersea cable between five continents to increase the capacity and reliability of digital data transmission.

Dubbed "Project Waterworth", it has been billed as its "most ambitious" undersea cable project and aims to provide "state-of-the-art connectivity across the US, India, Brazil, South Africa and other regions," Meta clarified, as quoted by AFP.

According to Meta, it represents a "multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment."

Submarine cables are an important infrastructure over which almost all of the world's digital communications take place.

The 450 or so cables currently installed around the world stretch some 1.2 million kilometres, according to a report by US think tank the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published in August 2024.

While four companies are reported to have shared almost the entire market as of 2021 (the US's SubCom, France's Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN), Japan's Nippon Electric Company (NEC) and China's HMN Technologies), digital giants like Meta are already developing their own infrastructures in response to the huge economic stakes these cables represent.

These infrastructures, which are extremely strategic, are regularly damaged by natural forces (underwater landslides, tsunamis) as well as by ship anchors.

They are also vulnerable to attempts at sabotage and espionage.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and generative AI models, which are particularly resource intensive, global digital traffic will continue to grow in the coming years. | BGNES