American giant Meta has announced plans to build the world's longest submarine cable.

With a length of 50,000 km, it will connect, among others, the United States, Brazil, South Africa and India.

All aboard! The Meta Group is preparing to deploy a submarine cable connecting five continents over more than 50,000 km, an infrastructure that aims to strengthen the reliability of digital data transport. Nicknamed "Project Waterworth", this titanic project represents a " multi-year investment of several billion dollars " and must bring " cutting-edge connectivity to the United States, India, Brazil, South Africa and other key regions ", explains the American giant in a blog post(new window) .

Submarine cables provide almost all of the world's digital communications. End to end, the approximately 450 pipes currently installed around the world extend over a distance of around 1.2 million kilometres, or 25 times around the Earth. While in 2021, four companies shared almost the entire market (the American company SubCom, the French company Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN), the Japanese company Nippon Electric Company (NEC) and the Chinese company HMN Technologies), digital giants like Meta are now developing their own infrastructures.

Highly strategic, these infrastructures are regularly damaged by natural elements (underwater landslides, tsunamis) but also by ship anchors. They can also be subject to sabotage and espionage attempts. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and generative AI models, which are particularly resource-intensive, global digital traffic is expected to continue to climb in the years to come. It could increase fivefold by 2030.