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. 

In the US, Google contracts with Lumen (formerly CenturyLink, Level3) as the landing partner to land Grace Hopper at the Bellport Cable Landing Station in New York. Lumen has no independent ability to affect the system’s operation.

In the UK, Google contracts with Lumen (formerly CenturyLink) as the landing partner to land Grace Hopper at the Bude Cable Landing Station in Cornwall. Lumen has no independent ability to affect the system’s operation.

In Spain, Google contracts with Telxius as the landing party to land Grace Hopper at the Sopelana Cable Landing Station in Bilbao and colocation at the Derio Communications Hub near Bilbao, which tightly integrates the Google Cloud region in Madrid. Pursuant to a landing party agreement, Telxius owns the portion of the Grace Hopper cable system that extends 12 nautical miles from the shores of Spain, and grants Google an IRU for the same portion of the system.

Google and its affiliates maintains ownership and control of the Grace Hopper cable system in US territory, UK territory and international waters.

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. 

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.