PARIS, France (AFP) — Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta has said it will lay an undersea cable stretching across five continents to carry data, including for developing artificial intelligence (AI).

The cable will run for more than 50,000 kilometres (31,000 miles) between the United States (US), South Africa, India, Brazil and “other regions”, Meta wrote in a blog on Friday.

Global digital communication relies on a vast network of undersea conduits, with roughly 1.2 million kilometres of cable already installed, according to a 2024 report by the US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Digital giants like Meta have recently muscled in to the world of subsea cables, long dominated by specialist companies like America’s SubCom, France’s ASN, Japan’s NEC and China’s HMN.

Intercontinental data flows underpin swathes of global economic activity, but suffer regular accidental damage from incidents like underwater landslides, tsunamis or dragging ship anchors.

They can also be targets for deliberate sabotage and spying.

NATO in January launched dedicated patrols of the Baltic Sea after suspected attacks on telecom and power cables that experts and politicians have blamed on Russia.

Dubbed “Project Waterworth”, Meta’s plan aims to “strengthen the scale and reliability of the world’s digital highways… with the abundant, high speed connectivity needed to drive AI innovation”.

The company said the cable project represented a “multi-billion-dollar, multi-year investment”.

Meta’s explicit citing of AI as a reason for laying the cable highlights the technology’s bottomless appetite for data, likely to push global digital traffic ever higher in the years to come.