Facebook has partnered with China Mobile and others to build a undersea cable to help bring more reliable and faster internet to Africa, sources say for ~$1B
- U.S. giant starts new effort to boost internet on continent — Move comes after West Africa had outages from broken cables
Context & Ripple Effects
This May 2020 report is the seed of what became the 2Africa cable: a Facebook-led consortium with China Mobile and MTN Group that later grew to 35 landings across 26 countries and extended beyond the continent to the Middle East and India (per the consortium's own announcement). It also marks Facebook's second swing at African connectivity infrastructure — an earlier satellite partnership with Eutelsat aimed at beaming internet from space rather than laying cable.
First-order effects
- West African networks, which had suffered outages from broken cables, get a new redundant path — reliability, not just raw speed, is the stated goal of the roughly $1B build.
- China Mobile gains its first major subsea landing footprint on the African continent alongside Western carriers, sharing route economics with Facebook and MTN Group.
Second-order effects
- Facebook followed the cable inland: the 1,243-mile fiber build with Liquid in the Democratic Republic of the Congo exists specifically to connect to 2Africa, turning a sea-to-shore project into a terrestrial distribution network.
- Rival hyperscalers were pulled into the same playbook — Facebook's separate two-cable project with Google linking Singapore, Indonesia, and North America shows the model generalizing beyond Africa.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, content platforms keep absorbing capex that telcos once carried alone, shifting subsea infrastructure toward buyer-led consortia where the largest traffic generators set routes and pricing.
- A US platform co-building with China Mobile also foreshadows the geopolitical scrutiny now falling on submarine cables as strategic assets, with patrols already being increased to protect them from sabotage.
The trend: Internet platforms are becoming first-party owners of global connectivity infrastructure, funding subsea cables and fiber where their future users — and ad revenue — will come from.