Google to Deploy Three New Undersea Cables for Cloud Infrastructure

Google will commission three new undersea cables in 2019 in a substantial expansion of its global infrastructure. 

One of the cables will be entirely Google owned and will connect Los Angeles to Chile. The cable, which Google has dubbed Curie, will be the first intercontinental cable built entirely by a non-telecom company, according to Google. It will also be the first undersea cable to land in Chile in nearly two decades. 

“Once deployed, Curie will be Chile’s largest single data pipe,” said Benjamin Treynor, vice president of Google 24×7 cloud support group in a blog January 16. Google will use the cable to serve its customers and users across Latin America. 

“Owning the cable ourselves has some distinct benefits,” Treynor said. Since Google controls the design and the construction of the cable, the company has full say over the technical specifications, he noted. Private ownership also will allow Google to deploy and commission the cable more quickly. “Also, once the cable is deployed, we can make routing decisions that optimize for latency and availability,” he said. 

The other two cables are owned by consortiums, which Google as a member. 

One of the cables is called Havfrue and will directly link the U.S. to Ireland and Denmark. Google is working with Facebook, Aqua Comms and Bulk Infrastructure to deploy the cable, which is being built by undersea communications technology vendor TE SubCom.   

Early work has already begun on selecting the exact route the Havfrue cable will follow. The cable is expected to come online before the end of 2019 and will increase Google’s network capacity and resilience in North America, Treynor said. 

HK-G, or the Hong Kong-Guam cable system, is the third new cable that Google expects to commission in 2019. When deployed, the cable will increase Google’s network capacity in the Hong Kong region and deliver better performance and response times between Australia and major hubs in Asia, Treynor said. Google is working with NEC and RTI-C on the HK-G cable. 

Google currently has direct ownership in as many as eight other undersea cables linking its various data centers around the world. The company also leases capacity on multiple other submarine cables as well. The investments have helped Google build an infrastructure that it claims offers better speed, reliability and security than other cloud providers. 

Over the past three years alone, Google has spent an impressive $30 billion building out and expanding its infrastructure in a bid to outpace rivals like Microsoft and Amazon in the cloud services business. 

In addition to the new cables, Google this year will also add five new cloud regions in Los Angeles, Montreal, Finland, the Netherlands and Hong Kong. Google’s cloud regions are geographic areas that are comprised of multiple zones from which it delivers cloud services. 

Google currently has 13 regions and a total of 44 zones around the world. The company maintains a point of presence at over 100 locations worldwide. The new regions in the Netherlands and Montreal will open in the first quarter of 2018, while those in, Finland, Hong Kong and Los Angeles will open later this year.