Meta's undersea ambitions

Meta is a hugely profitable company that has built up a $70 billion cash hoard. The advantage of having all that dry powder is that it can invest heavily in infrastructure, like the $40 billion project to improve its AI capabilities. Now, Techcrunch is reporting that Meta is considering a $10 billion investment in an undersea cable that goes around the world.

What makes this investment unique is that Meta will be its sole owner. In most cases, consortiums own the cables and then divvy up the bandwidth according to their needs. It makes sense that Meta wants to own their own cable because their sites are responsible for 10% of all fixed and 22% of all mobile traffic. Owning the cable will help to ensure a good user experience, regardless of where people are based.

I suspect that Meta is doing it to enhance their AI functionality. They can build AI data centres worldwide and have those servers easily talk to each other. For example, running costs in South Africa and India are significantly cheaper than in the US, making them perfect locations to do heavy data processing. Meta hasn't officially announced anything yet, insiders say more details will be released in early 2025.