Software major Microsoft and Facebook announced that they will make investment in a new subsea cable across the Atlantic.

The new and innovative submarine cable is expected to meet the growing demand for high speed connections for cloud and online services for Microsoft, Facebook and their customers.

They will begin the construction of the MAREA cable in August 2016 with complete the project in October 2017. Investment plans and name of vendors for the subsea cable project was not disclosed.

Microsoft and Facebook aim to accelerate the development of Internet infrastructure and support the explosion of data consumption and growth of their respective cloud and online services.

MAREA will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic – eight fiber pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160Tbps.

Telxius, a new telecommunications infrastructure company by Telefonica, will operate and manage the new 6,600 km submarine cable system that will connect the United States to southern Europe, from the data hub of Northern Virginia to Bilbao, Spain and then to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

MAREA will be interoperable with a variety of networking equipment – promising lower costs and easier equipment upgrades.

“Microsoft continues to invest in our cloud infrastructure to meet current and future growing global demand for our more than 200 cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live and the Microsoft Azure platform,” said Christian Belady, general manager, Datacenter Strategy, Planning & Development, Microsoft Corp.

Najam Ahmad, vice president of Network Engineering at Facebook, said: “By creating a vendor-agnostic design with Microsoft and Telxius, we can choose the hardware and software that best serves the system and ultimately increase the pace of innovation.”