The most expensive privately funded subsea cable ever attempted is running into trouble that no amount of engineering can fix. Meta’s 2Africa Pearls project, a 45,000-kilometer fiber-optic ring designed to encircle the African continent and extend into the Middle East and beyond, has been delayed again—this time by armed conflict in the Red Sea region. What was supposed to be a landmark infrastructure achievement connecting 33 countries across three continents now faces an uncertain timeline, ballooning costs, and questions about whether any single company should bet this heavily on a geopolitically fragile corridor.
The setback centers on Houthi militant activity in the Red Sea, which has made it effectively impossible to lay cable through one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints. As TechRadar reported, the 2Africa Pearls extension—the segment that would connect the main African loop through Saudi Arabia, India, and into Southeast Asia—has been put on hold because cable-laying ships simply cannot operate safely in the area. This isn’t a minor scheduling hiccup. It’s a fundamental challenge to the project’s architecture.
To understand the scale of what’s at stake, consider the numbers. The 2Africa system, first announced in 2020 by a consortium led by Meta and including Vodafone, China Mobile International, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, Starhub, Telecom Egypt, and others, carries an estimated price tag exceeding $2 billion. The cable’s design capacity of 180 terabits per second would make it the highest-capacity subsea cable system ever deployed. At full build-out, it would serve roughly 3 billion people—about 36% of the global population—many of whom currently have limited or no access to reliable high-speed internet.
That ambition now looks like a liability.
The Red Sea has become one of the most dangerous waterways on the planet. Since late 2023, Houthi forces based in Yemen have launched repeated attacks on commercial shipping, ostensibly in response to the Israel-Gaza conflict. Cargo ships have been struck by drones and missiles. Insurance premiums for Red Sea transit have skyrocketed. And the disruption extends well beyond surface vessels. Subsea cables running through the Bab el-Mandeb strait—the narrow passage connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden—have already sustained damage. In February 2024, multiple cables in the region were severed, affecting internet connectivity across parts of East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. While the exact cause of those breaks remains disputed, the timing was conspicuous.
For Meta, this represents the second major setback for the 2Africa project. The system had already experienced delays related to permitting disputes in certain African nations and the sheer logistical complexity of landing cables in more than 40 locations across politically diverse territories. Supply chain constraints during and after the pandemic slowed manufacturing of the specialized cable needed for the project. But those were tractable problems—delays, not dead ends. The Red Sea situation is different in kind. You can’t negotiate with a missile.
And yet Meta has shown no public indication of abandoning the project. The company’s broader infrastructure strategy depends on it. Mark Zuckerberg has been vocal about Meta’s intention to build out its own network infrastructure rather than rely on capacity purchased from traditional telecom operators. The logic is straightforward: as Meta’s family of apps—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads—continues to grow in emerging markets, particularly across Africa and South Asia, the company needs massive, low-latency data pipes connecting those users to its data centers. Buying that capacity from third parties is expensive and leaves Meta dependent on carriers whose priorities may not align with its own.
So the company builds. Meta is now one of the largest investors in subsea cable infrastructure on Earth, rivaling Google and Microsoft. The 2Africa system is the crown jewel of that effort, but it’s far from the only project in Meta’s portfolio. The company has invested in the Marea cable across the Atlantic, the Jupiter cable in the Pacific, and several other systems. But 2Africa is unique in its geographic scope and strategic importance. No other cable system attempts to serve so many underserved markets in a single ring topology.
The ring design itself is both a strength and a vulnerability. In theory, a ring provides redundancy: if a break occurs at one point, traffic can be rerouted the other direction around the loop. But the Red Sea segment isn’t just any link in the chain. It’s the connection point between the African ring and the Pearls extension, which reaches into the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, India, and eventually Southeast Asia. Without it, the system can still function as an African loop, but the intercontinental connectivity that makes 2Africa transformative—the part that connects African markets to Asian ones and to Middle Eastern internet exchange points—remains incomplete.
The geopolitical dimension here extends well beyond the Houthis. The Red Sea corridor has become a flashpoint for great-power competition. The United States and its allies have conducted strikes against Houthi positions. China maintains a military base in nearby Djibouti. Russia has sought port access in Sudan. And the cable infrastructure running through these waters carries an outsized share of global internet traffic—some estimates put it at 17% of all intercontinental data flows. That concentration of digital infrastructure in a conflict zone has alarmed policymakers and intelligence agencies for years. The 2Africa delays are, in a sense, the commercial manifestation of a strategic vulnerability that national security analysts have been warning about.
There are alternative routes, but none of them are cheap or fast. One option would be to route the Pearls extension around the southern tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean, avoiding the Red Sea entirely. But that adds thousands of kilometers of cable, dramatically increasing both cost and signal latency. Another option is to wait out the conflict, but there’s no indication that Houthi attacks will stop anytime soon—especially given the intractable nature of the broader Middle Eastern conflicts fueling them. A third possibility: build overland connections through Egypt or other North African nations to bypass the maritime chokepoint. But overland cables come with their own complications, including right-of-way negotiations, maintenance challenges in arid environments, and the political risk of routing critical infrastructure through countries with their own governance uncertainties.
Meta hasn’t publicly disclosed which option it’s pursuing. The company declined to comment specifically on the timeline for the Pearls extension when asked by multiple outlets. But industry sources suggest that Meta and its consortium partners are quietly exploring rerouting options while maintaining the position that the original plan remains the long-term goal.
Meanwhile, the delays are being felt on the ground. Across Africa, internet service providers had been planning capacity upgrades and pricing changes based on the assumption that 2Africa would come online on schedule. In countries like Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa—where internet penetration is growing rapidly but infrastructure remains a bottleneck—the cable system was expected to dramatically reduce the cost of international bandwidth. Every month of delay means higher costs for ISPs and, ultimately, for consumers.
The competitive picture is shifting too. Google’s Equiano cable, which runs along Africa’s western coast, is already operational and picking up traffic that might otherwise have waited for 2Africa. China’s HMN Technologies (formerly Huawei Marine Networks) continues to build cable systems across Africa and into the Middle East, often with financing tied to broader Belt and Road Initiative agreements. The longer 2Africa is delayed, the more ground Meta and its partners lose to competitors who are already in the water.
There’s a broader lesson here about the fragility of the physical internet. We tend to think of the internet as something ethereal—data floating through the cloud. In reality, more than 95% of intercontinental data travels through undersea cables, many of them no thicker than a garden hose, lying on the ocean floor in some of the world’s most contested waters. The 2Africa delays are a stark reminder that the global internet depends on physical infrastructure that is vulnerable to the same geopolitical forces that disrupt oil shipments and grain exports.
For Meta specifically, the situation raises questions about concentration risk. The company has bet heavily on a single massive system rather than diversifying across multiple smaller cables on different routes. That approach maximizes capacity and efficiency when everything works. When it doesn’t, the exposure is enormous. A company spending upwards of $2 billion on a single cable system—while simultaneously investing tens of billions in AI infrastructure—has limited tolerance for indefinite delays.
But walking away isn’t really an option either. The markets 2Africa is designed to serve represent the next billion internet users. Africa’s population is projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050. India already has more internet users than any country except China. These are the growth markets that will determine Meta’s revenue trajectory for the next two decades. Without its own infrastructure connecting those markets, Meta remains at the mercy of incumbent telecom operators who have little incentive to offer favorable terms.
So Meta waits. And plans. And presumably spends considerable time studying maps of the Red Sea, hoping for a resolution that may not come soon. The 2Africa project remains one of the most ambitious infrastructure undertakings of the 21st century. Whether it becomes one of the most cautionary tales depends on factors far beyond any tech company’s control—factors measured not in terabits per second but in missiles per month.
Dave Ritchie is a technology writer based in the Midwest who has covered internet infrastructure and enterprise technology for over a decade.