The Grace Hopper Cable System is a new private subsea cable system invested by Google, following its Curie, Dunant and Equiano.

The Grace Hopper cable connects the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain, with 6,250 km from New York to the Cornish seaside resort town of Bude in the U.K. and 6300 km from New York to Bilbao in Spain. 

The Grace Hopper cable is one of the first new cables to connect the U.S. and the U.K. since 2003. and the first investment by Google in a private subsea cable route to the U.K. and the first-ever route to Spain. The Spanish landing point will more tightly integrate the upcoming Google Cloud region in Madrid.

The Grace Hopper cable consists of 16 fiber pairs (32 fibers), with 22Tbps per fiber pair and a total of 352Tbps system capacity, a significant upgrade to the internet infrastructure connecting the U.S. with Europe.

SumCom is the supplier and turn-key contractor for the Grace Hopper cable. 

Telxius acts as the landing partner in Spain, providing Sopelana cable landing station in Bilbao and colocation at Derio Communications Hub near Bilbao.

The Grace Hopper cable project is expected to be completed in 2022.

The cable is named for computer science pioneer Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906–1992), best known for her work on one of the first linkers (compilers), which was critical in the development of the COBOL programming language. She’s also credited with famously finding an actual “bug” in a program; her team tracked down the source of a short circuit on the early Harvard Mark II computer to a moth trapped in a panel. It is to honor Grace Hopper’s legacy of innovation by investing in the future of transatlantic communications with a state-of-the-art fiber optic cable.

For more about Google's investment in subsea cable, please visit the Complete List of Google's Subsea Cable Investments.