Extending 45,000 km across the seabed to link 33 countries, 2Africa is now the world’s longest subsea cable project, designed to interconnect Europe, Asia and Africa. The start of 2026 marks a decisive milestone for the project. Following its launch in 2020, the core infrastructure was declared completed in late 2025 with the finalisation of crucial landings, including Egypt’s Port Said and Ras Ghareb stations. This means the primary African “loop” is now fully operational, with the final “Pearls” extension – which extends the network into the Arabian Gulf and India – set to go live later this year to complete the system’s global reach.
While subsea cables have long linked the globe by skimming past African coastlines, the 2Africa project represents a fundamental shift: for the first time, the continent itself is the main conduit rather than a peripheral stop. 2Africa is led by Meta and backed by a heavyweight consortium including Telecom Egypt, China Mobile International, MTN Global Connect (Bayobab), Orange, center3 (owned by STC Group), Vodafone and the West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC).
At the heart of this project is Egypt. As a unique land bridge between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, Cairo has become a non-negotiable geopolitical pivot point. Today, over 90% of all data traffic between Europe and Asia transits through Egyptian territory, accounting for approximately 17% of total global internet traffic.
The Mediterranean segment of 2Africa alone boasts a design capacity of 180 terabits per second (Tbps); more than the combined capacity of all existing subsea cables serving the continent today.
Missed opportunity?
As the primary landing point for this and dozens of other systems, Egypt serves as a vital chokepoint. But there remains a gap between physical transit and digital sovereignty. As Mohammed Soliman, director of the strategic technologies and cyber security program at the Washington-based Middle East Institute explains, the real constraints begin after the cable lands: power availability, data centres, peering arrangements [agreements between separate internet networks to directly exchange traffic], regulation and demand.
“Cables reduce the cost of moving data but they do not determine where it is processed, stored or monetised. Without local termination, Africa becomes a corridor rather than a platform.”
Despite the physical expansion of subsea cables around Africa, less than 1% of global data centre capacity is currently located on the continent, even as Africa accounts for roughly 18% of the world’s population. This reflects a profound gap between where digital traffic is carried and where it is actually processed and stored.
African states derive some revenue from their position as cable landing points. Telecom Egypt, which operates much of the country’s subsea infrastructure, reported wholesale revenue of about 6.8bn Egyptian pounds (around $140m) in the first half of 2025 – much of which comes from services tied to submarine cables.
Other landing markets such as South Africa and Nigeria also generate revenue from transit and interconnection services, though public estimates for these are less widely available. But compared with the potential economic gains from hosting large-scale data processing and storage, these figures are modest.
Fola Adeleke, executive director and co-founder of the Global Center on AI Governance, notes that “new infrastructure projects like 2Africa often assume that key enabling conditions are already in place – such as widespread internet penetration, reliable electricity, strong national backbone networks and affordable mobile broadband.”
In practice, these conditions are uneven across countries, producing very different outcomes from similar cable investments. The effects are most visible in Africa’s usage gap. “Roughly 60% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa – over 700m individuals – live within reach of mobile broadband but do not use it, largely because of affordability… Digital sovereignty will be difficult to achieve in practice without some form of reliance on external actors or better-resourced regional hubs.”
Boosting local leverage
For African countries to move beyond being mere conduits, infrastructure must be paired with robust local ecosystems. “The countries with leverage are the ones that enforce open access, competitive backhaul [the links carrying traffic between the extremities of a network and its core] and credible peering markets,” says Mohammed Soliman. “If terminating traffic locally is cheaper and safer than exporting it, pricing power starts to rebalance naturally. Governments don’t need to fight consortia – they need to make their domestic markets unavoidable.”
Africa does host a growing number of data centres – over 223 operational facilities across 38 countries as of mid-2025 – but these are heavily concentrated in a few markets. South Africa leads with around 56, followed by Kenya (19), Nigeria (17) and Egypt (about 13), collectively accounting for more than 40% of the continent’s data centres. Other initiatives, such as regional internet exchange points (IXPs) in West Africa (IXPN in Nigeria, GIX in Ghana) and cloud-focused public-private partnerships, aim to increase local termination and create incentives for traffic to stop and stay.
Soliman identifies three tiers of digital infrastructure across Africa: “A small group of emerging hubs where data increasingly terminates. A larger group of transit states that host infrastructure without capturing much value. And a long tail that consumes connectivity without shaping it. Egypt is not locked into the second tier, but it is not automatically in the first. Geography gives it optionality, but policy determines the outcome.”
Hosting subsea cables does not automatically create a digital economy: “if most traffic still leaves the country to be processed, the economy is not digital but logistical. Subsea cables are necessary infrastructure. They only become development tools when countries force value to stop, compute and compound locally.”
Building on the cable
Addressing this challenge requires a coordinated, regional approach, particularly for smaller economies that cannot build comprehensive ecosystems independently. Adeleke says that the African Union and regional economic communities can enable critical infrastructure by “helping mobilise financing mechanisms [and] strengthening institutional cooperation through common standards and harmonised regulatory approaches”.
“In the short term, digital sovereignty will remain difficult for many African states given the continent’s heavy reliance on external actors – especially big technology firms – for funding, infrastructure build-out and platform services,” Adeleke warns. He stresses the importance of partner diversification, cybersecurity safeguards and investment in home-grown solutions, such as domestic or regional cloud capacity, to mitigate the risks of overreliance and geopolitical competition.
Ultimately, turning subsea connectivity like 2Africa into broad-based economic value requires tackling affordability and inclusion head-on. As Adeleke argues, the priority should be “to make connectivity affordable… That means harmonising policies that lower smartphone costs, supporting scalable device-financing programmes, and pairing these with stronger competition and open-access rules for backbone and wholesale connectivity… This is what would turn new subsea capacity into real, broad-based digital inclusion and long-term economic value.”