Good morning. Andrew Nusca here, back in action after a week in New York for our inaugural AIQ Summit about putting AI to work in large companies. (Many thanks to Alexei Oreskovic for steering the ship while I was away.)
Miss the AIQ festivities? No sweat—you can watch the entire thing here or view a session of your choosing here. If you’re in the business of deploying AI in the enterprise, there are lots of good insights to be had.
And today’s tech news? Well, let’s get right to it. —Andrew Nusca
Thoughts? Suggestions? Hot tip? Drop me a line.
THE BIG STORY
Meta is building one of the world’s biggest undersea cable networks
While data centers dominate headlines amid mounting local opposition over electricity bills, water use, and zoning fights, Meta has been expanding its infrastructure somewhere far less visible: the bottom of the ocean.
On Sept. 21, the company announced Petal, a roughly 4,300-mile subsea cable connecting the U.S. and France. Meta says the cable, expected to enter service in 2029, will be the first to deliver petabit-scale capacity across an ocean—double what today’s most advanced transoceanic cables can handle, thanks to “two-core fiber” that fits two light paths inside each strand.
Projects like this rarely make headlines in an industry fixated on AI models and apps, but they’re what make those products run. Products like Meta’s personal AI agent Muse depend on moving enormous volumes of data between its data centers and its users around the world.
Subsea cables aren’t new territory for Meta, which is now valued at roughly $1.85 trillion. The company has spent the past decade building its presence on the seafloor and says it has invested in more than 20 subsea cable projects. Taken together, those projects touch every continent except Antarctica.
The most ambitious is Project Waterworth, announced in February 2025. Meta says the system will stretch more than 31,000 miles, longer than the Earth’s circumference. It will connect the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, India, and other regions across five continents.
Meta hasn’t built all of this alone. Petal is being developed with Japan’s NEC and Sumitomo Electric Industries, and French telecom Orange is handling the landing on France’s Atlantic coast. Meta has even partnered with rivals: The MAREA cable between Virginia and Spain, completed in 2017, is jointly owned with Microsoft and telecom company Telxius.
These projects don’t come cheap. TechCrunch estimates that the Waterworth project could top $10 billion. —James LaForge
THE BLIND BOX
“Just because you are using AI, that is not a proxy for your productivity or you doing a good job at work.”
THE RUNDOWN
—Trump forms “Super Intelligence Force” led by National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton.
—OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”
—Meta's Muse compiles “a page for every person in the user's life,” per Wired.
—Firmus IPO: Investor demand far exceeds the offer size, one of Australia's largest.
—Schneider Electric may buy PTC, the U.S. engineering software firm, for $20 billion.
—Apple CEO John Ternus is in the design studio “several times per week,” per Bloomberg.
—McKinsey: AI and automation will eliminate 36 million U.S. jobs by 2035 but add 41 million elsewhere.
—U.K. neobank Monzo may sell a 15% stake to CVC and Advent after a Nubank deal fell apart.
THE PARTING SLOP
Sam told Mark not to say anything. Mark can't go in there, brazenly flaunt the rules and then think Sam’s gonna share his CUDA with him. Sorry! This is what comes from living under a Jensen regime.