Google to Build a New Private Cable System — Grace Hopper

Google announced Tuesday the investment of a new subsea cable—Grace Hopper—which will run between the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain, providing better resilience for the network that underpins Google’s consumer and enterprise products. SumCom is the supplier and turn-key contractor for the Grace Hopper cable. And the Grace Hopper cable project is expected to be completed in 2022.

The Grace Hopper cable will connect New York to the Cornish seaside resort town of Bude in the U.K. and Bilbao in Spain. It will run 6,250 km from New York to Bude in the U.K. and 6,300 km from New York to Bilbao in Spain, and consists of 16 fiber pairs (32 fibers), and significantly upgrade the internet infrastructure connecting the U.S. with Europe.

The Grace Hopper cable is new private subsea cable wholly invested by Google, following Curie, Dunant and Equiano to be a part of Google's complete investments in subsea cables.

The Grace Hopper cable will be one of the first new cables to connect the U.S. and the U.K. since 2003, increasing capacity on this busy global crossroads and powering Google services like Meet, Gmail and Google Cloud. It also marks Google's first investment in a private subsea cable route to the U.K., and Google's first-ever route to Spain.

Earlier in June, Google and Telefónica announced a new partnership to foster the country's digital transformation and advance 5G mobile edge computing. As part of this agreement Google Cloud plans to open a Google Cloud region in Madrid that will leverage Telefonica's Madrid region infrastructure. 

Telefónica owns through its subsidiary Telxius a cable landing station in Bilbao, where the MAREA cable system landed. The Bilbao cable landing station is about 400km away from the Google Cloud region in Madrid.