Google announces another subsea cable investment to boost cloud business

Google has revealed it latest investment in its Asia-Pacific in its cloud infrastructure with the Japan-Guam-Australia (JGA) Cable System to connect Hong Kong, Australia and Singapore.

The internet giant has been solidly ramping up its cloud business over the last few years, with this investment building on an announcement in January, which added five new data centres to the map and three subsea cables. The cable investments provide improved connectivity to Google’s five cloud regions across Asia and Australia.

“This new addition to the Google submarine network family, combined with investments in the  Indigo, HK-G and SJC subsea cables, will give GCP users access to scalable, diverse capacity on the lowest latency routes via a constellation of cables forming a ring between the key markets of Hong Kong, Australia and Singapore,” said Michael Francois of the Global Network Infrastructure team.

“Our investment in these cables builds on our other APAC cable systems, namely Unity, Faster and PLCN, interconnecting the United States with Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong.”

The system will have two fiber pairs connecting Japan to Guam, and two fiber pairs connecting Guam to Sydney, which is being co-built by NEC and Alcatel Submarine Networks. The JGA-South segment is being developed by a consortium of AARnet, Google, and RTI-C, while the JGA-North segment is a private cable being developed by RTI-C. The entire system will cover 9500km.

While serving cloud customers will of course be an objective here, it is worth noting the rest of the Google business relies on fast and reliable infrastructure as well. When the lion’s share of your profits rely on effective search engine performance, reliable mapping technologies or being able to have a positive video experience on YouTube, investments in such infrastructure are critical.