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The Race for Cheap, Quick Data in Africa, by Samanth Subramanian – 14 October 2025

From The Dial

Meta has invested heavily in a submarine cable to Africa. What will it ask for in return?

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.”

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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Samanth Subramanian is an Indian writer and journalist based in London.

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