Google’s upcoming Grace Hopper subsea cable will span the Atlantic Ocean, connecting the U.S. to Europe.
The search giant revealed its latest undersea cable on Tuesday, saying in a blog post that the cable will connect New York City to Bude, U.K., and Bilbao, Spain. Google said that it expects the cable, named after acclaimed computer scientist Grace Hopper, to be complete sometime in 2022.
Undersea cable provider Subcom is contracted to build the cable. Subcom has led a number of undersea cable projects, including one cable that links Australia to Oman and another one that connects Virginia Beach to Saint-Hilaire-De-Riez in France, according to the company’s website.
The planned Grace Hopper cable will be Google’s “first-ever route to Spain” and the company’s first investment in a cable that goes to the U.K., vice president of the Google global network Bikash Koley said in the post. Some of Google’s other subsea cable projects include Curie, which connects the U.S. to Chile, and Equiano, which links Portugal to South Africa.
Like other tech giants, including Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, Google has been investing in massive subsea cable projects as part of its vast cloud-computing data center network. These subsea cable networks help funnel nearly 99% of the world’s Internet traffic and are especially important for companies like Google that provide web services to users all around the world.
But some subsea cable projects are more controversial than others.
The U.S. Justice Department, for instance, is opposing a Google- and Facebook-backed subsea cable project that would connect the U.S. and Hong Kong, citing national security issues. Earlier this summer, a government working committee comprising members of the Justice Department and Homeland Security, among others, said that the cable project should “be rejected entirely if the route includes Hong Kong,” as Fortune previously reported.
