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The company is investing billions in privately owned subsea cable systems to feed the bandwidth demands of AI and global connectivity.
Meta is quietly becoming one of the world’s most aggressive builders of undersea internet infrastructure, with ambitions that now stretch toward petabit-per-second cable capacity on transatlantic routes. The company’s engineers have indicated they could reach roughly 1 petabit per second on longer subsea routes, effectively doubling current performance benchmarks, as part of a broader push to own the pipes that carry the internet across oceans.
To put that in perspective: one petabit per second is one million gigabits. The fact that a social media company is building this kind of infrastructure tells you everything about where the tech industry is heading.
Meta’s subsea empire keeps growing #
The centerpiece of Meta’s underwater ambitions is Project Waterworth, announced in February 2025. It’s designed to be the world’s longest subsea cable system, spanning over 50,000 kilometers and connecting landing points across five continents, including the United States, India, Brazil, and South Africa.
Waterworth uses a 24 fiber-pair architecture, a significant technical step up from older cable designs. The system incorporates advanced routing technology and protective measures rated for deep-water deployment at depths of up to 7,000 meters.
Meta is also advancing its Aurora transatlantic cable system, which connects the US to Denmark over approximately 7,268 kilometers. Aurora targets a total design capacity of around 497 terabits per second and is expected to enter service in 2028.
And beyond these confirmed projects, Meta’s engineers are actively working on architectural advances to push cable capacity toward the 1 Pbps threshold on extended routes. Industry-wide, the target for petabit-class cables is roughly 2030, which would represent a generational leap in submarine telecommunications.
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Why a social media company is laying ocean cables #
Subsea cables carry over 95% of all intercontinental internet traffic. For years, tech companies leased capacity on cables built by telecom consortiums. But the explosion in data demand, driven especially by AI training and inference workloads, has changed the calculus. Hyperscalers like Meta, Google, and Microsoft have increasingly moved toward building and owning their own systems outright, cutting out the middleman and ensuring they control the bandwidth they need.
Meta has been at the forefront of this shift. Project Waterworth alone represents a multi-billion dollar investment. When you add Aurora and the company’s research into next-generation petabit architectures, the total commitment to subsea infrastructure is staggering for a company that technically sells advertising.
The competitive landscape underwater #
Meta isn’t the only tech giant playing this game. Google has been investing in subsea cables for over a decade, with systems like Equiano (connecting Europe to Africa) and Grace Hopper (connecting the US to the UK and Spain). Microsoft has partnered on multiple cable projects as well. Amazon, through AWS, has also expanded its subsea footprint.
But the scale of Meta’s recent commitments stands out. A 50,000-kilometer system touching five continents is not a modest infrastructure upgrade.
The race to petabit-class cables also has geopolitical dimensions. Countries and blocs increasingly view subsea cable routes as strategic assets. Where cables land, who owns them, and which nations they connect are all questions that attract attention from regulators and national security agencies.
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