Grace Hopper joins our other private undersea cables, curious, Dunant And Equianoto connect remote continents across the ocean floor. Private undersea cables allow us to effectively plan for the future capacity needs of our customers and users around the world, and add a layer of security that goes beyond what is available on the public Internet.

Once operational, Grace Hopper will be one of the first new cables to connect the US and UK since 2003, increasing global capacity and supporting Google services such as Meet, Gmail and Google Cloud. This also marks Google’s first investment in an undersea cable route to the UK, and our first route to Spain. Landings in Spain will be more closely integrated Google Cloud’s next region is in Madrid in our infrastructure. The Grace Hopper cable will be equipped with 16 fiber pairs (32 fibers), representing a significant upgrade to the Internet infrastructure currently connecting the United States and Europe. The project is expected to be completed in 2022. The cable construction contract was signed several months ago with SubCom, a submarine cable provider based in Eatontown, NJ, and the project is expected to be completed in 2022.

Grace Hopper will feature innovative fiber optic switching, a technology that improves the reliability of global communications, allowing us to better move traffic in the event of a power outage. Google and SubCom engineers collaborated to incorporate this innovative architecture into the system. Grace Hopper is the first undersea cable in the world to use this technology and we hope to apply this technology to other systems in the future.