Google to spend $1B on enhancing subsea internet infrastructure in the Pacific

Google LLC today announced a $1 billion initiative to build new subsea internet cables in the Pacific and extend the region’s existing networking infrastructure.

The first goal of the project is to build a new transpacific network link called Proa. According to the search giant, it will connect Japan with the U.S. territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. The cable is set to be built by NEC Corp., a Tokyo-based maker of telecommunications equipment.

Google will also work with the company on a second new internet link called Taihei. It’s expected to link Hawaii and Japan’s Ibaraki prefecture. 

In Ibaraki, the cable will connect to facilities that Google originally built to support an earlier transpacific internet link called Topaz. Commissioned in 2022, Topaz stretches from Vancouver to Japan. It’s designed to process the data traffic generated by Google Cloud and the search giant’s consumer services.

“Subsea cables can bring economic and productivity gains to the places where they land,” Brian Quigley, the vice president of global network infrastructure at Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post today. “For example, in Japan, studies estimate Google network infrastructure investments drove an additional $400+ million in GDP in the previous decade.”

Google’s newly announced connectivity initiative will also see it upgrade the existing subsea network infrastructure in the Pacific Ocean. 

According to the company, one focus of the effort is a cable called Tabua that it started building late last year. It’s designed to connect the U.S. and Australia to French Polynesia. Google’s newly detailed network expansion initiative will see it extend Tabua to Hawaii.

Separately, the search giant plans to upgrade a cable called TPU that links Taiwan, the Philippines and the U.S. by adding a cable landing in Northern Mariana Islands. It will also finance the construction of a regional network interlink for connecting the Northern Mariana Islands, Hawaii and Guam. 

“This interlink will connect the transpacific routes, improving their reliability and reducing latency for users in the Pacific Islands and around the world,” Quigley detailed. 

Google also makes significant investments in terrestrial network infrastructure. The company’s cloud data centers feature a system called Titanium that uses multiple custom chips to optimize hardware operations. One of those chips, which is known as the Titanium offload processor, helps speed up the computations in processing network traffic from cloud instances.

Rival Microsoft Corp. is also believed to be developing a custom processor for networking tasks. In February, The Information reported that the chip is intended to support the company’s artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Image: Google