Marseille

city · earth

The principal French Mediterranean port, founded as the Greek colony of Massalia around 600 BCE, and — for reasons that have very little to do with its history and everything to do with its position — one of the most important nodes of the physical internet. Marseille sits at the northern end of the corridor that carries Europe's traffic to Africa, the Middle East and Asia: cables that have crossed Egypt and the Mediterranean come ashore here rather than continuing to northern Europe, because every additional thousand kilometres of cable is cost, latency and exposure. As of the mid-2020s it is a landing point for well over a dozen systems in service or under construction, among them SEA-ME-WE 4 and 6, 2Africa, PEACE and Medusa, and the port authority has built dedicated landing infrastructure with space for the power feed equipment of several systems at once. The result is a genuine second-order effect: because the cables land there, data centres have been built there, and because the data centres are there, more cables land. Marseille is the clearest European example of how a physical chokepoint becomes an economic one.