Equiano cable system is the third private international cable owned by Google and the 14th subsea cable invested by Google. 

Equiano connects Sesimbra (Portugal) to Cape Town (South Africa), with branching units to Lagos (Nigeria), Lomé (Togo), Swakopmund (Namibia), Rupert's bay (St Helena), etc.  

Named for Olaudah Equiano, a Nigerian-born writer and abolitionist who was enslaved as a boy, the Equiano cable is state-of-the-art infrastructure based on space-division multiplexing (SDM) technology, with 12 fiber pairs and design capacity of 144Tbps, approximately 20 times more network capacity than the last cable built to serve this region. The SDM technology was first deployed in Google's second private subsea cable, Dunant.

Equiano will be the first subsea cable to incorporate optical switching at the fiber-pair level, rather than the traditional approach of wavelength-level switching.

A contract to build the Equiano cable with Alcatel Submarine Networks was signed in Q4 2018, and the first phase of the project, connecting South Africa with Portugal.

The Equiano cable system has been ready for service since March 2023.