Redazione RHC : 14 November 2025 09:35
Global traffic, as RHC readers know, travels mostly under the sea.
According to TeleGeography, a telecommunications institute, there are more than 530 active submarine optical cable systems worldwide, which together exceed 1.48 million kilometers— over 35 times around the Earth. These links carry over 95% of international internet traffic and form the infrastructure upon which much of the digital economy rests.
In recent years, major tech companies have stepped up investments and infrastructure projects, turning submarine cable management into a strategic and competitive lever. On November 6, Amazon announced Fastnet , a transatlantic fiber-optic cable that will connect Maryland, USA, to County Cork, Ireland, with entry into service expected in 2028.
At the other end of the Pacific, Google signed an agreement in June with the Chilean government to lay a 14,800-kilometer submarine cable between Valparaiso, Chile, and Sydney, Australia. The project, estimated to be operational by 2027 and valued between $300 million and $550 million, will have Google covering the majority of the costs. This isn’t the group’s first experience: in 2019 , Curie, a roughly 10,000-kilometer cable connecting the West Coast of the United States to Valparaiso, entered service. As of November 2025, Google has invested in or built a total of 33 submarine cables, six of which are wholly owned.
Meta (formerly Facebook) unveiled an even more ambitious plan in February: the $10 billion Waterworth project , which includes over 50,000 kilometers of cables and landing points in the United States, Brazil, India, and South Africa. Once completed, it will be the longest undersea cable system in the world. Overall, investment in submarine cable projects would rise to approximately $13 billion between 2025 and 2027, nearly double the 2022-2024 period.
The advantage is threefold. First, performance : much of the existing infrastructure dates back decades — the oldest submarine cable still in service was activated in 1989 —and no longer meets today’s requirements. New sections allow for greater capacity and speed: Fastnet, for example, is designed for a capacity of no less than 320 Tbps, a value the article compares to the simultaneous transmission of 12.5 million high-definition films per second . Meta has also introduced advanced burial techniques into the Waterworth project to reduce damage from anchors or human activity on the seabed.
Second reason: cost optimization. A significant investment today can reduce recurring payments for capacity leased from third parties. For companies with large traffic volumes—like Meta, whose 2024 net profit was $62.36 billion— directly building cables can be cost-effective over multi-year horizons.
Third strategic element: network autonomy and control. Owning the physical backbone reduces dependence on third-party telecommunications operators and mitigates the risk of congestion or outages due to capacity limitations.
The rise of artificial intelligence has made this infrastructure even more critical. Training and inferencing large-scale models requires transferring petabytes of data between distributed data centers ; algorithms running in parallel require frequent synchronization and minimal latency. An increase of even a few milliseconds can result in delays of hours or days in completing training tasks, with significant financial repercussions. Furthermore, a cable failure can interrupt extremely expensive training processes.
Historically, submarine cables were jointly owned by telecom operators and leased to large companies . Today, Google, Amazon, and Meta are transitioning from large customers to infrastructure owners, redefining the competitive logic of the global network. Whoever controls the physical paths of data traffic will have not only a technical but also a strategic advantage in the race for digital technologies.
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