Microsoft and Facebook announced Thursday that they will lay a 4,000 mile undersea cable from Virginia to Spain.
The cable will be called “Marea,” which means “tide” in Spanish, and will be able to transmit 160 terabytes of data per second, USA Today reports, which will make it the highest-capacity cable laid across the Atlantic. Microsoft told USA Today that the collaboration on the cable will support the growth of both companies’ cloud and online services.
Marea is not the first undersea cable; it joins many others laid by tech companies trying to grow their bandwidth. According to USA Today, Google started the trend in 2010 with investment in a cable across the Pacific Ocean between Japan and the United States.
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Write to Tessa Berenson at tessa.Rogers@time.com