Project Waterworth

Big Tech is investing in infrastructure so you don’t have to

Meta’s subsea cable plans are fascinating in the context of increasing rent-seeking by the tech sector, says Jason Walsh
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Image: Meta

21 February 2025

Having apparently tired of creating a virtual world, Facebook owner Meta Platforms has set its sights on the real world, announcing plans to lay the world’s longest subsea cable. The cable, named Project Waterworth, will, over its 50,000 kilometre length, span five continents, delivering artificial intelligence-generated slop and dubious political memes along with, presumably, the rest of the Internet with hitherto unimagined efficiency.

While the scale of Meta’s ambition is not to the dismissed, what is interesting to me about this move is that it comes at precisely the time when the tech industry in general is attempting to wring profits from users through inertia.

Meta is far from alone in paying for more plumbing. Indeed, the artificial intelligence (AI) bubble has resulted in a data centre boom. Microsoft, for instance, plans to spend $80 billion (approx. €76.4 billion) on data centres this year, while Amazon, the leader in cloud computing, is also dumping billions into infrastructure in the US, Britain, Italy and elsewhere.

Building server sheds makes sense, of course, when you have convinced everyone to hand over to you the keys to their kingdom. Meta’s underwater wire is a little bit more fundamental, though; a little bit more nuts and bolts, and here too its thinking is also clearly in line with that of its peers: Google has its own subsea cables and is planning new ones, while Microsoft is part-owner of several and wants to build more. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, meanwhile, has littered the sky with its bent-pipe tin cans, in an effort to get to places no-one can be bothered wiring-up.

This trend is not simply about building infrastructure but also about securing long-term economic advantage, and it is instructive that the very companies that want the rest of us to leave the tech to them are pouring money into such things. 

Notice that tech businesses are shifting everything to a subscription model. Whether in the consumer or the business-to-business space, their goal is to get their hooks into the customer and drag out recurring revenue on an ongoing basis. Not only does this smooth out earnings, it also affords the opportunity to boil the frog with endless, seemingly miniscule but cumulatively significant, price hikes.

This is capitalism in the banal sense that it is occurring in market economies, but for all the talk of innovation, an increasing amount of the technology sector’s actions today come down to seeking economic rents.

Think of it this way: due to the accounting trick of moving expenditure from the capital to the operational column, businesses have been able to gussy up their results in a way that pleases investors. The truth is, however, that spending is spending, and the mere act of classifying it differently changes nothing in reality. Moreover, capital expenditure is important, both for individual companies as it is what gives them a future, and for the wider economy which is where that future plays out – something that is itself borne out by the cable ships preparing to leave port.

To be clear, subsea cables are not the issue here and are, generally speaking, a good thing. What is important, however, is that they demonstrate that the tech giants recognise the importance of boring infrastructure and, in the broadest sense, ‘operational’ technology, all the while encouraging the rest of us to not bother with it.

In other words, cloud computing is fine as far as it goes, but growing reliance on ‘somebody else’s computer’ is hardly a recipe for long-term innovation and technological independence.

Within individual organisations, skills are being lost as computing, and indeed information technology more broadly, become mystified with most of us only able to operate at application level, if even that. We’ll stick to our dashboards while 10 or, at most, 20, technology businesses control not only the software, but the data and even the pipelines it is squirted down. 

In technology, we are becoming a nation of renters, and the landlords are laying the foundations for perpetual tenancy.

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