Facebook's Semi-Secret W Cable

 A few days ago I wrote that Facebook was planning a new subsea cable directly linking the US East Coast to South Africa, then up to India, onward to Australia, and finally to the US West Coast. Clearly resiliency is a big theme. It avoids Lisbon, Marseille, Egypt, the Red Sea, and Singapore. All choke points due to their telecom hub status. Note that the map below shows lots of branching units, but I don't have insider confirmation although they make perfect sense. The cable is 16 fibre pairs. 

This cable may be heavily influenced by AI considerations. AI data centres require lots of space and power. The US, South Africa, India, and Australia are good candidates for AI data centres in terms of space. All of them except for South Africa have modern power grids. But South Africa is still the best place on the continent for large scale AI facilities.

An AI theme makes particular sense given the cable's high latency. An AI data centre does not directly serve customers. It is a facility for estimating high parameter, nonlinear statistical models. Large language models are exactly that. Big statistical models that predict what the next word should be based on huge amounts of human language examples (like the Library of Congress and everything stored online). The estimated models are then distributed to the edge closer to end users.

The cable also illustrates the rising importance of India in the global telecom ecosystem. India will generate the bulk of the traffic traversing the proposed network. To ensure the cable is a success, lots of branching units to reach different countries seems reasonable. Brazil, Nigeria, Kenya, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore ought to be connected to the cable. 



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