As Google continues its relentless growth of its data and cloud services, the company announced today their plans to have three new undersea data cables by the end of 2019. The cables are fully owned by Google and will provide data infrastructure support to various regions and the company’s Cloud Platform.
The announcement came as part of a larger GCP (Google Cloud Platform) announcement where the company indicated 5 new GCP locations will be coming online in 2018. These will be Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Montreal, Netherlands, and Finland. These new POPs will give GCP more localize control and cut down data haul times (measured in milliseconds) to those areas & regions.
As for the new submarine cables, they are:
- Curie, a private cable connecting Chile to Los Angeles
- Havfrue, a consortium cable connecting the U.S. to Denmark and Ireland
- Hong Kong-Guam Cable system (HK-G), a consortium cable interconnecting major subsea communication hubs in Asia.
Undersea surveying has already begun for some of these cables with the deployment and design of the cables all controlled by the Mountain View company.
Google’s New Undersea Data Cables
Google has direct investment in 11 cables, including those planned or under construction. The three cables highlighted in yellow are being announced in this blog post. (In addition to these 11 cables where Google has direct ownership, we also lease capacity on numerous additional submarine cables.)
Outside of the timeframe of 2019, there is no indication in the announcement of which cable will be laid first nor capacity details. Given the millions of dollars that are involved in laying such undersea cables, you can expect that they will be massive. Indeed, for Chile, it will be the first new connection to the country in 20 years and will be the single largest data pipe available to the country.
