A look at Meta's and Google's subsea cable investments in Africa, the least connected continent, as the companies seek the terrestrial links to a billion users
For the business world the Queen's Speech is often about bemoaning …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2022 Rest of World feature sits mid-arc in a decade-long buildout: local operators and US platforms had already been scrambling to upgrade African digital infrastructure in a continent holding less than 1% of global data center capacity, and Meta was openly pairing that investment with expansion into lightly regulated markets like Nigeria as Western pressure mounted (per The Guardian).
What followed validates the thesis: Google committed $1B to Pacific cables and then detailed Umoja, the first fiber route linking Africa to Australia via Kenya and South Africa, while Meta scaled up to Project Waterworth's 50,000 km, five-continent system. The throughline is platforms buying the physical layer rather than renting it.
First-order effects
- Meta and Google shift from being tenants of telecom carriers to owners of the landing stations and backhaul that determine bandwidth costs and quality for African ISPs and their billion-user growth market.
- African regulators and governments now negotiate with two US platforms that control critical transit routes into their markets, not just with traditional carriers.
Second-order effects
- Security risks in the southern Red Sea have left Meta's 2Africa project incomplete and delayed Google's Blue-Raman cable (Bloomberg), exposing how chokepoint geopolitics can stall both companies' African capacity plans at once.
- Local operators and cloud providers must plan around platform-owned routes: capacity pricing and peering terms increasingly get set by Meta and Google rather than by regional carriers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, intercontinental connectivity consolidates around a handful of US platforms whose cable maps double as commercial strategy — infrastructure decisions made in Menlo Park and Mountain View shape which regions get cheap bandwidth first.
- That concentration invites a regulatory reckoning: states dependent on privately owned cables face the same sovereignty questions over physical networks that they already face over app stores and AI models.
The trend: Big Tech is absorbing the subsea cable layer itself, turning internet backbone ownership into a competitive moat in underconnected markets like Africa.