Skip to main content
MetaIn development

Meta is building one of the world’s biggest undersea cable networks - it’s just one piece of a growing seafloor empire spanning 6 continents

What happened

Meta is building Project Waterworth, a subsea cable system that will stretch more than 31,000 miles and connect the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, India, and other regions.

Source

Article excerpt

While data centers dominate headlines amid mounting local opposition over electricity bills, water use, and zoning fights, Meta has been expanding its infrastructure somewhere far less visible: the bottom of the ocean. On Sept. 21, the company announced Petal, a roughly 4,300-mile subsea cable connecting the U.S. and France. Meta says the cable, expected to enter service in 2029, will be the first to deliver petabit-scale capacity across an ocean. It will carry 1 petabit per second, or about 125,000 gigabytes per second, double what today’s most advanced transoceanic cables can handle. According to Meta, that’s enough capacity for three-quarters of the world’s population to stream music at the same time. The company says Petal achieves this with two-core fiber, which fits two light paths inside each strand. That lets Meta double capacity without a proportional increase in power or physical infrastructure. Projects like this rarely make headlines in an industry fixated on AI models and apps, but they’re what make those products run. Meta’s personal AI agent, Muse, launched Sept. 8 and climbed to No. 1 on Apple’s U.S. App Store within two weeks, overtaking ChatGPT. It did so even as critics questioned how much access the agent needs to users’ email, calendars, and payment accounts. Muse is powered by Meta’s Muse Spark models, and products like it depend on moving enormous...

Keep reading with a free account

The rest of this article, and every signal for Meta, is in your free account.

Extracted from this sentence

The most ambitious is Project Waterworth, announced in February 2025.

Extracted by Autobound

From the Signal API record
Event
In development

What this signalsWork in development often leads to new buying for tools, data and services.

Product
Project Waterworth

More in development signals at other companies

The full record

From the Signal API record

Topics and mentions

Product tags

  • general technology
  • data

Extraction

Confidence
90%
Detected
Oct 3, 2026
signal_type
news
signal_subtype
is_developing

Use this data

Get every in development signal for Meta and the companies you sell to, in the tools you already use.

  1. Ask Claude about it

    Connect Autobound to Claude, Claude Code or Cursor with MCP. Then ask: “What changed at Meta this week?”

  2. Send it to your own tools

    The Signal API returns in development signals for any list of companies as JSON, for your CRM, warehouse or app.

  3. Try it free

    Sign up and spend your free credits on the companies you sell to.

    Start Free1,000 free credits

The API returns more than this page shows

This page shows a preview. The full news record in the Signal API and MCP can also have these 8 fields. Some fields are empty for some signals.

Company

  • linkedin_urlValue in the API
  • industriesValue in the API
  • employee_count_lowValue in the API
  • employee_count_highValue in the API
  • revenueValue in the API
  • descriptionValue in the API

Signal

  • signal_nameValue in the API
  • associationValue in the API
Show the full JSONThe record on this page and the API request

GET /v1/signals/e03e223b-b405-bc74-8643-a60cb114ff76 returns this record as JSON. POST /v1/companies/enrich returns every signal for meta.com.

{
  "signal_id": "e03e223b-b405-bc74-8643-a60cb114ff76",
  "signal_type": "news",
  "signal_subtype": "is_developing",
  "detected_at": "2026-10-03T10:44:00+00:00",
  "company": {
    "name": "Meta",
    "domain": "meta.com"
  },
  "data": {
    "url": "https://fortune.com/2026/10/03/meta-building-undersea-cables-petal-us-france-mark-zuckerberg/",
    "title": "Meta is building one of the world’s biggest undersea cable networks - it’s just one piece of a growing seafloor empire spanning 6 continents",
    "author": "James LaForge",
    "excerpt": "While data centers dominate headlines amid mounting local opposition over electricity bills, water use, and zoning fights, Meta has been expanding its infrastructure somewhere far less visible: the bottom of the ocean. On Sept. 21, the company announced Petal , a roughly 4,300-mile subsea cable connecting the U.S. and France. Meta says the cable, expected to enter service in 2029, will be the first to deliver petabit-scale capacity across an ocean. It will carry 1 petabit per second, or about 125,000 gigabytes per second, double what today’s most advanced transoceanic cables can handle. According to Meta, that’s enough capacity for three-quarters of the world’s population to stream music at the same time. The company says Petal achieves this with two-core fiber, which fits two light paths inside each strand. That lets Meta double capacity without a proportional increase in power or physical infrastructure. Projects like this rarely make headlines in an industry fixated on AI models and apps, but they’re what make those products run. Meta’s personal AI agent, Muse, launched Sept. 8 and climbed to No. 1 on Apple’s U.S. App Store within two weeks, overtaking ChatGPT. It did so even as critics questioned how much access the agent needs to users’ email, calendars, and payment accounts. Muse is powered by Meta’s Muse Spark models , and products like it depend on moving enormous...",
    "product": "Project Waterworth",
    "summary": "Meta is building Project Waterworth, a subsea cable system that will stretch more than 31,000 miles and connect the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, India, and other regions.",
    "planning": true,
    "image_url": "https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/GettyImages-2297798327.jpg?resize=1200,600",
    "confidence": 0.9,
    "product_data": {
      "name": "Project Waterworth",
      "full_text": "Project Waterworth",
      "fuzzy_match": false
    },
    "product_tags": [
      "general_technology",
      "data"
    ],
    "published_at": "2026-10-03T10:44:00Z",
    "article_sentence": "The most ambitious is Project Waterworth, announced in February 2025."
  }
}

Long text fields are shortened on this page.

Looking up one signal by its id is free. Enrich costs 2 credits per signal returned; a call with no results is free.