74: Taking the plunge - The engineering journey of building a Subsea Cable

To ensure that everyone has access to resilient, high-speed and low-latency connections to Meta services, no matter where in the world they are, Meta makes large-scale investments into subsea cable infrastructure. The recently announced Project Water worth will, Once complete, reach five major continents and span over 50,000 km (longer than the Earth’s circumference), making it the world’s longest subsea cable project using the highest-capacity technology available. 

In this episode, host Pascal talks with another Pascal and his colleague Andy who are involved at every stage of these projects and share the surprising challenges one has to deal with when working on the largest subsea cable project in the world.

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Links

• Project Waterworth: https://engineering.fb.com/2025/02/14/connectivity/project-waterworth-ai-subsea-infrastructure/ 

Timestamps

• Intro 0:06

• Introduction Andy 2:14

• Introduction Pascal 3:21

• Why do we build our own subsea cable infrastructure? 4:15

• Current state of Meta-owned subsea cables 6:20

• Project Waterworth 7:40

• Why invest in more subsea cables? 9:00

• What does a cable look like? 11:14

• The process of laying subsea cable 16:39

• Unexpected findings on the ocean floor 19:25

• Shallow vs deep ocean 21:12

• Merging different cable types 24:00

• What happens when a cable breaks? 25:04

• Memorable challenges 27:42

• Cable capacity 29:51

• The long history of subsea cables 33:07

• What's next? 36:27

• Outro 39:02