MANILA, Philippines – Microsoft announced Thursday, May 26 (May 27, Manila time) it was teaming up with Facebook to build a subsea cable across the Atlantic Ocean.

Microsoft said this is to “help meet the growing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for cloud and online services for Microsoft, Facebook and their customers.”

Called MAREA – Spanish for “tide” – the submarine cable will stretch 6,600 kilometers from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to Bilbao, Spain. The construction of the subsea cable will begin in August, with operation and management to be handled by Telxius.

MAREA is expected to be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic, as the cable will have an “initial estimated design capacity of 160 Terabits per second (160 Tbps)” of bandwidth, which Wired says is around 16 million times the bandwidth of an average home Internet connection.

The cable will allow for more efficient transfer of data across data centers, which is especially useful when it comes to the data services Facebook and Microsoft have.

Frank Rey, Director of Global Network Acquisition for Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure and Operations, explained: “We’re seeing an ever-increasing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for Microsoft cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live, and Microsoft Azure.”

“As the world continues to move towards a future based on cloud computing, Microsoft is committed to building out the unprecedented level of global infrastructure required to support ever faster and even more resilient connections to our cloud services,” he added. – Rappler.com