Sunil Tagare, a subsea cable expert (and pioneer in the space, as founder of Flag Telecom), who was the first to report Meta’s plans back in October, told TechCrunch that the plan is to start with a budget of $2 billion but as the project builds out that figure is likely to go up to more than $10 billion as the project extends into years of work.

Sources close to Meta confirmed the project but said it is still in its early stages. Plans have been laid out, but physical assets have not, and they declined to discuss budget. The expectation is that Meta will talk more publicly about it in early 2025, when it will confirm plans for the cable, including intended route, capacity, and some of the reasoning behind building it.

It would be years before it is fully operational, were the strategy to be followed through, given that the limited number of companies, like SubCom, that are capable of building out the infrastructure already have large customers, like Google, reserving its services.

“There’s a real tight supply on cable ships,” said Ranulf Scarborough, a submarine cable industry analyst. “They’re expensive at the minute and booked out several years ahead. Finding the available resources to do it soon is a challenge.” One likely scenario could involve building in segments, he added.

The subsea cable, when completed, would give Meta a dedicated pipe for data traffic around the world. The planned route of the cable, says sources, currently sees it spanning from the east coast of the U.S. to India via South Africa, and then to the west coast of the U.S. from India via Australia — making a “W” shape around the globe, as visualized here by Tagare:

“They make their money from their products being presented to end users, and they will do everything they can to ensure customer experience, whether that’s delivery of video or other assets,” said Scarborough, the analyst. “Frankly, who’s going to rely on traditional telcos anymore? Tech companies are now independent. They’ve realized they’ve got to build it themselves.”

The second reason is geopolitical threats.  Several times in recent years, subsea cables have been taken down as collateral or direct damage from warfare. Houthi fighters, backed by Iran, are going after boats and in the process are damaging cables in the Red Sea (such as this one connecting Europe to India). This month, Russia was suspected of cutting a submarine cable in the Baltic Sea. Just this week, another cable went down in European waters, with a Chinese ship currently getting the blame.  The route as envisioned by Meta is intended to help the company “avoid areas of geopolitical tension,” a source close to the company told TechCrunch.  Tagare points out in his blog post that the route would avoid the Red Sea, the South China Sea, Egypt, Marseilles, the Straits of Malacca and Singapore — “all of whom are now major single points of failure.”

The FCC’s announcement this month that it plans to review submarine cable licensing for the first time in decades, partly due to national security and ownership of the cables, could potentially also figure as another fillip here: Meta would be the sole owner of a route through safe corridors.

There is a possible third reason for Meta’s subsea vision, although it’s more speculative.

According to a theory of Tagare’s, it is directly related to the cable terminating in India. He believes that Meta has an opportunity to build out data center capacity in the country specifically for training and working with AI models, and the subsea cable could play a role in that effort.  He points out that India’s cost for compute bandwidth is a fraction of the price in the U.S., and many in India have been buzzing after a recent visit by Jensen Huang: in a meeting with Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani, the Nvidia CEO talked about India building its own AI infrastructure. Reliance, among other vendors, will be using Nvidia’s Blackwell chips in future AI data centers.  “India could become the training capital of the world,” Tagare said in an interview. He believes that Meta might well want to build AI training in the country around that infrastructure.

AI is a big part of Meta’s infrastructure roadmap. But beyond that, India is a huge market for Meta, topping estimates as the country with the most users by far on Facebook (more than 375 million users), Instagram (363 million), and WhatsApp (536 million) and those consumers are proving to be very enthusiastic for newer features like its AI tools. With robust investments being made into the data center market in the country, India still has a lot of growth potential, so these facts alone make it logical to have India as a landing point in the operation.

Sources close to the project told TechCrunch that it’s too soon to say whether AI is part of the equation for Meta in this project, describing it as part of the “long tail” of considerations and possibilities, along with whether Meta would open capacity to other users alongside itself.