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Every time someone in Mumbai video calls a relative in São Paulo, or a company in Melbourne uploads data to a server in California, the information barely touches a satellite. Instead, it travels through glass fibers thinner than a human hair, laid across ocean floors that most people never think about. That quiet infrastructure is now at the center of two very different stories: one about a technology company building the longest undersea cable ever attempted, and another about a decades old cable finally being hauled out of the sea for good.
In February 2025, Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ: META) announced Project Waterworth, a plan to lay more than 50,000 kilometers of subsea fiber optic cable connecting the United States, India, Brazil, South Africa and other regions. The company described it as a multi billion dollar, multi year investment. If completed, it would surpass 2Africa, the current record holder at 45,000 kilometers, to become the longest subsea cable system in the world. Meta said the cable would use 24 fiber pairs, the highest capacity design available, buried at depths reaching 7,000 meters in places, with extra protection near coastlines where ship anchors and fishing gear pose the greatest risk.
The route matters as much as the length. Rather than following the traditional path through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, or the contested waters of the South China Sea, Waterworth is designed to avoid both. Researchers at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute have noted that this routing sidesteps chokepoints where cable damage has already caused real disruption, including a 2024 incident in the Red Sea that cut internet access for several East African countries. It also routes U.S. connectivity to Asia, Africa and South America without passing near Chinese controlled waters, a detail that has drawn attention from policy analysts tracking the broader contest over digital infrastructure.
As of mid 2026, Waterworth remains earlier in its life than the announcement might suggest. Meta has not published a final route map, total cost or completion date. The clearest picture so far has come not from Meta but from regulatory filings in Australia, where telecommunications operator Vocus lodged an environmental referral in June 2026 for a seabed survey covering a proposed landing near Darwin, with spur lines extending to Townsville and Karumba. That survey is expected to begin in September 2026 and run about six months, with results used to help finalize the route before any construction decision is made. In other words, in at least one market the project is still at the survey stage, not the cable laying stage.
Waterworth is not Meta’s only subsea project. In October 2025 the company introduced Candle, an 8,000 kilometer cable linking countries across East and Southeast Asia with 570 terabits per second of capacity, alongside upgrades to existing systems including Apricot, Bifrost and Echo. Together with a handful of rival cloud computing companies, Meta now accounts for a large share of the world’s submarine cable capacity, a shift from the telecom consortium model that dominated the industry for decades.
While Meta lays new cable, a much older one is being pulled out of the water entirely. TAT8, the first fiber optic cable ever laid across the Atlantic, began carrying traffic in 1988 and was retired in 2002 after a fault too costly to repair. It sat untouched on the seabed near Portugal for more than two decades until Subsea Environmental Services began recovering it, using a specialized vessel to drag a flat grapnel along the cable’s mapped route at roughly one knot. The recovered material is shipped to a recycling facility in South Africa, where copper, steel and polymer components are separated and returned to industrial supply chains. TAT8 is a small fraction of what remains on the seafloor: an estimated two million kilometers of decommissioned cable worldwide has never been recovered, and only a handful of companies specialize in bringing it back up.
Taken together, these two stories describe the full life cycle of an industry most people rarely think about. Companies like Meta are racing to lay tens of thousands of kilometers of new cable to keep pace with demand for artificial intelligence and cloud computing, while a small, specialized industry is only beginning to clean up what came before. Nearly all of the world’s international data still travels through cables lying quietly on the ocean floor, and the businesses that build, route and eventually retire them are shaping the digital economy in ways that rarely make headlines.
