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Two of the world’s biggest tech giants are teaming up in the name of data – namely to build a massive new connection between the US and Europe..
Facebook and Microsoft have come together to create a giant underwater cable that will run between Virginia and Bilbao in northern Spain.
The cable, named Marea – Spanish for tide – will be used to transfer the vast amounts of data between the many computer data centres that both companies have in Europe.
Najam Ahmad, Facebook’s vice president of network engineering, explained: “If you look at the cable systems across the Atlantic, a majority land in the Northeast somewhere.
“This gives us so many more options.”
Both companies have plenty of data to move – Microsoft has Office, Bing and its cloud service Azure, while Facebook has its social network of over a billion users, the Messenger platform, WhatsApp and Instagram.
Both firms say the new connection will enable them to move data more efficiently to the Middle East and Asia as well as Europe, and follows in the footsteps of Google, who themselves have invested in two cables that stretch between the US and Japan.
The development has been described as a sign of the times by industry analysts, who say that the ability of technology companies to fund their own global data networks show they have replaced telecoms giants at the top of the communications industry.
