The Race for Cheap, Quick Data in Africa
Meta has invested heavily in a submarine cable to Africa. What will it ask for in return?
OCTOBER 14, 2025
Ever since my fixation with submarine cables began, my white whale was always 2Africa, the 28,000-mile beast that is being looped from Cornwall to Portugal, down Africa’s western coast and up its eastern flank, before diverging to head on the one hand to Mediterranean Europe and on the other to the Middle East and India. The cable had been conceived in 2019, on a whiteboard in Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters, and its forty-six landings in countries on three continents will, according to Meta, “deliver seamless international connectivity to approximately 3 billion people, representing 36 percent of the global population.” Meta has seven other partners in the 2Africa consortium, but it is bearing the largest share of expenses. No one has officially revealed how much the cable will cost; when I asked one Meta executive if the often-circulated figure of $1 billion was approximately right, he hemmed and hawed and said: “Yeah, it’s probably around that.”
Countries in Africa, with few data centers of their own, must push their financial and health records, their governance and welfare data, and their security information to data centers offshore — probably through 2Africa to Europe.
By virtue of its sheer scale, everything that gratifies us about submarine cables feels amplified a hundredfold in 2Africa; the same goes for everything that worries us. Africa is sorely under-served by the internet. In 2021, only 22 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa were using mobile internet. The average cost of 1 gigabyte of mobile data was 10.5 percent of a person’s monthly income. Only a third of the population across Africa had any kind of broadband at all. Meta claims Africa’s economic activity will rise by $37 billion in the two or three years after 2Africa is lit up in 2025. Whether you believe Meta’s figure to be self-serving or not, there’s little doubt that, in a world so hooked on the internet, it’s a handicap for a country to lag behind in its access to the online realm. At the same time, a continent with a dismal history of exploitation by Western corporations is once again compelled by circumstances to rely upon one such corporation. By being the dominant partner in 2Africa, Meta now wields enormous power over the future of communication in many nations. Having spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the cable, Meta will want to prioritize the business of making that money back — by hoovering up user data, serving targeted ads, and pinning browsers within the iron embrace of its various platforms. Countries in Africa, with few data centers of their own, must push their financial and health records, their governance and welfare data, and their security information to data centers offshore — probably through 2Africa to Europe. It’s a paradoxical wrinkle in the world of undersea cables. At a time when many wealthy governments are growing increasingly jumpy about their sovereign control over their data infrastructure, poorer nations find that if they want better internet at all, they must relinquish some of their sovereign control to Western tech giants.
In Africa, you don’t have to search too hard to find a precedent for this. When oil and gas were discovered across the continent, its governments desperately needed the revenues but didn’t have the resources to pull these fuels out of the ground. That task had to be ceded to Western oil corporations; even today, they control two-thirds of oil and gas production in Africa. The profits from the oil and gas tend to go overwhelmingly to these companies, their shareholders, and their investors. (They also flow to governments — but often as bribes to officials, and too meagerly as tax payments.) It’s hard to make the argument, for instance, that Nigeria’s abundant oil reserves and half a century of extraction have enriched the country when two-thirds of the population lives on less than $2 a day. It’s easier to see the corruption and the blight of pollution in the Niger delta, as well as the imminent, awful consequences in Africa of the climate change caused by burning carbon. The oil industry has been simultaneously indispensable and exploitative — just as the data industry threatens to be. For Africa, oil is indeed the old data.
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I first heard about 2Africa in detail from Rick Perry, the head of international network planning at Vodafone, which is one of the partners in the 2Africa consortium. Perry is such an old-school legend in the submarine cable world that Vodafone named its allotted 2Africa fiber pairs “SHARP,” short for “System Honoring the Achievements of Rick Perry.” “My ex-boss sorted this out,” Perry told me. “I think he wanted to stitch me up. It’s very embarrassing.” Perry, a cheerful man with a kind face and a nimbus of white hair, had been in the cable industry for half a century when we first met. Fresh out of school, he joined Cable & Wireless’s training college in Porthcurno, in Cornwall, and after two years of training, he was sent out into the world — to Bahrain, to be precise, where his first job was to monitor the company’s international telegraph circuits. As he stayed with Cable & Wireless and moved up its ranks, he got involved in investing in its cable networks. For a long time, this involved buying capacity on other cables, but in the 1990s, his team instigated their first project from scratch: Solas, running between the U.K. and Ireland. “We came up with it in a pub,” Perry said. “All the good ideas come out of pubs.”
Inevitably, planning the industry’s longest cable proved to be one of the industry’s heaviest headaches. Landing in dozens of African countries entailed negotiating with just as many different, and sometimes outdated, regulatory and permitting regimes.
Back then, anyone planning a cable route had to account for pit-stops: places where the cable could briefly make landfall so that its signal could be repowered and then sent on its way. It reminded me of airline journeys from the early years of flights, when planes skipped from one airport to the next, taking on fuel at every stop. This was why, for instance, the island of Guam came to host a cottage industry of landing stations: It was the most convenient place for a cable to break journey amid the vast, watery span of the Pacific Ocean. By the time 2Africa came about, though, transmission technology had come so far that the cable could run from South Africa to England on a single dose of power. (Just to be safe, Perry said, 2Africa comes ashore in west Africa anyway, to secure a power backup.) The capacity of cables, of course, has grown as well. 2Africa has 16 fiber pairs, with an aggregate capacity of 180 terabits per second —a universe away from Solas and its 720 megabits per second. In the 1990s, Perry had never imagined that kind of leap, he said. “It’s just incredible.”
2Africa was an idea even before Meta appeared on the scene. Around 2017, while working with east African telecom operators, Vodafone figured that the best way to cut the price of data was to build a new cable — a “cage system” encircling Africa, Perry said. The company gathered some partners into a consortium, including Chinese operators heavily involved in their country’s Belt and Road infrastructure scheme. But the funding didn’t add up. “The project, I think, was going to cost $300 million or so, and we could never quite get to $300 million,” Perry said. “So we were bumbling along, thinking ‘Well, what do we do now?’ And suddenly Meta told us: ‘We’re building an African cable system. Do you want to join?’ So we thought: ‘They’ve got the money. Do we swallow our pride?’ We decided we’d join.”
Inevitably, planning the industry’s longest cable proved to be one of the industry’s heaviest headaches. Landing in dozens of African countries entailed negotiating with just as many different, and sometimes outdated, regulatory and permitting regimes. The cable’s intended route ran through the neighborhoods of hot wars in Yemen and the Sudan. Off the opposite coast, along western Africa, the cable negotiated the Congo Canyon by heading further out to sea and skirting it entirely; the additional length of cable would be more expensive, but there are few companies better placed than Meta to absorb that extra cost. In the first two years of the pandemic, negotiating with bureaucrats in person was impossible, but getting to them virtually wasn’t always easy either — ironically because of the very bandwidth issues that 2Africa was trying to address. When one South African team, consisting of scientists and surveyors, sailed out to chart the seabed, it couldn’t return home thanks to pandemic regulations; the ship stayed at sea for three months. Since employees of Fugro, the surveying company, couldn’t jet around the world as they normally do, the work of scouting coastlines to pick cable landing points had to be farmed out to local subcontractors. In the Seychelles, the beach chosen to land the cable turned out to be a turtle habitat, Perry said. “So we had to have 24-hour watch over a number of weeks to make sure the turtles weren’t disturbed.”
By the time I met Perry, in late 2023, 2Africa had already branched out and landed in a number of countries. (Five different ships had been needed to lay just the deep-sea part of the cable system off eastern Africa. It took all of 2022.) When I told Perry that I wanted to watch one of 2Africa’s landings, he told me I could have my pick: Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire hadn’t been hooked up yet. For weeks, I kept in touch with officials at Bayobab, the African company in charge of landing the cable in these three countries, to coordinate a visit to Ghana. No date had been fixed as yet, one of them kept assuring me — only to have the official call me in late October and say, in very apologetic tones, that the landing had suddenly happened nearly overnight, because ASN’s ship had been in the area and had some time to spare. After the winter holidays, before I could collect myself, the cable arrived in Nigeria.
That left Côte d’Ivoire. On WhatsApp, I shadowed my Bayobab friends relentlessly, and they reassured me in March 2024 that the landing in Abidjan was imminent. They were just as reassuring in May, and then in July, August, and September. Finally, early in October, the magic message arrived. The cable would land in Abidjan, the old capital, on October 9. If I made haste, a Bayobab executive told me, I could see Côte d’Ivoire be connected to the longest, most advanced submarine cable in the world.
Bayobab’s headquarters in Côte d’Ivoire lies just north of Abidjan’s long lagoon, in a hilly neighborhood perversely called Plateau. In the trees lining the avenues, thousands of fruit bats roost through the day and then take flight at dusk. I caught sight of the great chiropteric ascent one evening, as my taxi was driving through the city. Up they swarmed, above the high-rises and treetops, until the skies above Plateau seemed to flicker and fragment, as if a celestial television screen had suddenly filled with snow.
To get 1.4 billion Africans to spend money online, it was first necessary to give them cheap, quick data. If the highway toll was too expensive, why would they drive to the supermarket at all?
Already, by the time I reached Abidjan on the evening of October 8, a delay of some kind had manifested. The next day, when I visited Florent Guede in his office, he explained it to me. Guede, the managing director of Bayobab in Côte d’Ivoire, is a compact, big bellied man, and although he laughs often and easily, he had the jittery air of someone in limbo. Côte d’Ivoire had already waited months for 2Africa; ASN’s ships had been occupied elsewhere, and the Abidjan landing had been pushed so much that it became the last one on the continent. Now an ASN vessel, the Ile de Sein, had sailed to the Gulf of Guinea to complete the landing, but the plow that would trench and bury the cable had developed a snag. Even as we sat in his office, he received an update: The landing would proceed on the morning of Friday, October 11, weather permitting. He beamed and grew less anxious. “Interesting times, interesting times,” he said.
Another man sat with us in Guede’s cabin, his lean frame folded into an office chair: Ibrahima Ba, Meta’s director of network infrastructure. For my purposes, it was like he was both there and not there. We were in Abidjan for the same event, staying in the same hotel, attending the same meetings, and often riding in the same car — but since Meta hadn’t permitted me to speak to him, or indeed to anyone else, none of our conversations technically ever took place. Which is a shame, because insofar as any one person is the progenitor of 2Africa, it is Ba — a man who grew up in the north of Mauritania, a country that is almost wholly in the Sahara desert, and that got some spotty 4G services in its biggest towns only in 2021. Elsewhere, Ba has evangelized the kind of faster, more reliable access to the internet that 2Africa promises. “We believe that connectivity is good for businesses of all sizes, including Meta,” he told The Nation, a Nigerian publication. “When people come online, we hope that they will consider using our services.” The logic was impeccable. To get 1.4 billion Africans to spend money online, it was first necessary to give them cheap, quick data. If the highway toll was too expensive, why would they drive to the supermarket at all?
On Thursday, October 10, with the landing barely 24 hours away, I attended a ceremonial meeting during which Bayobab formally told Côte d’Ivoire’s telecommunications minister of the cable’s imminent arrival. Officials and executives fitted themselves around a long conference room table in a government building, while reporters and camera operators encircled them. For his audience, Guede played up the resilience that 2Africa would provide his country. Until then, three big international cables landed in Abidjan. Two of them, ACE and WACS, had just a couple of years to go before they turned 15, at which point operators who’d bought capacity on them could choose to leave the consortiums. The third, SAT 3, was nearly a quarter-century old — primed to be decommissioned altogether. Not only were these cables on the brink of obsolescence, but they also ran over the Trou sans Fond, a subsea canyon off the Ivorian coast — similar to the Congo Canyon, and posing the same kinds of dangers. Just half a year earlier, in March 2024, a landslide in the Trou sans Fond had ruptured all three cables, throttling or even blacking out the internet in Côte d’Ivoire and 12 other countries. Stock exchanges closed early. Earnings calls were disrupted. Connectivity in Côte d’Ivoire plunged to 3 percent of ordinary levels. Côte d’Ivoire’s internet infrastructure scores a measly 22 percent on the Internet Resilience Index — lower even than Afghanistan. One estimate put the country’s daily losses from a total outage at $24 million — and full repairs took the better part of two months.
All these businesses were banking on connectivity getting better and better with every passing year — a kind of implicit determinism that reminded me of other beliefs, such as the one that house prices could only ever go up, or the one that the economy would always grow in the long run.
All this was at the back of Guede’s mind as he talked about 2Africa. About how, close to the coast, it would be buried below the seabed at a depth of two meters. And how it was routed to avoid the Trou sans Fond altogether. And how it was set up so that even a local break — in the branch connecting Nigeria to the main trunk of 2Africa, say — wouldn’t affect connectivity in other countries. The minister nodded along. When Bayobab invited one of the reporters to ask a question, he wanted to know only one thing: How much cheaper would mobile data packs get? The minister grinned, refused to commit himself, and then stood up for a round of photographs.
That afternoon, Guede took Ba and me to the prospective landing point. We crawled through cataclysmic traffic to drive south, past the airport, and then east out of Abidjan and along the coast. The sea shone in the heat, switching color abruptly from a light teal to a deeper aquamarine. The shoulders of the road were lined with billboards advertising internet commerce: a gambling app called betclic, a company that sold cement “at a click,” a grocery delivery service, Uber. All these businesses were banking on connectivity getting better and better with every passing year — a kind of implicit determinism that reminded me of other beliefs, such as the one that house prices could only ever go up, or the one that the economy would always grow in the long run. For a moment, I marveled at the small, weird industry of cable-planners and cable-layers who’d turned the internet’s proliferation into such an axiomatic fact of life.
In Anani, an exurb a dozen miles east of Abidjan, our cars left the highway and drove through sand and scrub to reach 2Africa’s beach manhole. Beneath a door-sized rectangle of raised concrete, Bayobab had sunk a hollow concrete cube into the soil. The connections to the servers in the landing station a mile away had been installed, and a spaghetti of thick black cables lay concealed in the cube below the manhole. All that was needed, when 2Africa arrived on the beach, was for it to be threaded through into the cube, hooked up to the cables, and tested—simple enough to say, but in reality a process that would take weeks. Then Côte d’Ivoire and the rest of Africa had to wait until the spring or early summer of 2025 when 2Africa would be switched on—if everything went according to plan.
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Plans, in the realm of submarine cables, are purely contingent exercises. On our way back to the city from Anani, Guede received a phone call: the landing wouldn’t happen on Friday, October 10, after all, and there was no telling yet if it could take place on Saturday. Ba and I had both planned to fly out on Friday night, and we spent a fretful 24 hours, waiting until Friday afternoon for the news that everything was set for Saturday morning. Thrilled, we pushed our tickets out by a day.
On October 11, we reached the beach manhole just after dawn, to see that the Ile de Sein now lay just off the beach, its stern facing us. The curious sight of a large ship so close to shore had drawn no onlookers at all. The only people standing around were those working on the project—a small, cosmopolitan crowd of Ivorian telecom officials, a Lebanese contractor with his two bright-yellow earthmovers, Greek cable technicians, an American ASN rep, and the Panamanian chief of a diving and welding company. Ba and I stood on the beach and watched the distant bustle on board the Ile de Sein; then, figuring it would be a while before the action began, we drove to a nearby gas station for coffee.
When we returned, Guede was standing in a downcast knot of people. Once again, the landing was off. It turned out that, as is routine, ASN planned to use a smaller boat to bring the cable from ship to shore — a fiberglass vessel with twin outboard engines. That boat had been stationed in the Abidjan port overnight, and when ASN employees went to collect it that morning, they found it had sunk. “Can you imagine the look on their faces when they went there and didn’t find the boat?” the American ASN rep said. “That sinking feeling — literally, in this case!” No one seemed to know how or why that happened. Rustling up a replacement wouldn’t be easy. A cable is usually brought to a beach tied to orange floats, and an accompanying diver helps guide it into place and snips away the floats after it has been laid. The boat therefore needed metal or plastic cages installed around the engines, so that the diver wouldn’t get accidentally cut up by their blades — and finding a boat and then the right cages fit onto the boat would take time. “And if we don’t start the job by 8:00 a.m., then it’s All Stop until the next day, because we need all the daylight hours,” the Panamanian man, Jonathan Camacho, told me.
Unable to stay on, I left Côte d’Ivoire that night. When I called Guede on Tuesday, he sounded weary. The landing hadn’t happened on Monday either, he said. They’d found another boat, but when they fired it up and began heading the beach, it started sinking too — a coincidence that would have sounded hilariously absurd if it hadn’t been borderline dangerous for the men on board. The Ile de Sein was still in Ivorian waters, Guede said. But plans had evaporated. He had no idea when 2Africa would finally land in Abidjan.
Excerpted from The Web Beneath the Waves.
✺ Published in The Dial
