Meta pushes toward petabit-scale subsea cables as it builds out massive underwater infrastructure

Meta is building petabit-scale subsea cables including Project Waterworth and Aurora, investing billions to own the infrastructure powering AI ...

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--> Meta official logo (public domain, Wikimedia Commons) — CryptoBriefing brand treatment The company is investing billions in privately owned subsea cable systems to feed the bandwidth demands of AI and global connectivity.

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21, 2026 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.

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.

Subsea cables carry over 95% of all intercontinental internet traffic.

For years, tech companies leased capacity on cables built by telecom consortiums.