Google will build a new submarine optical cable to connect Chile and Australia through French Polynesia. This will also be the first submarine optical cable to directly connect South America and the Asia-Pacific region. This submarine optical cable is named "Humboldt" after the German generalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (Alexander von Humboldt). It is the latest of more than a dozen similar submarine optical cables that Google has invested in and built in the past 15 years.
While there are countless other undersea cables crossing the Pacific, they essentially connect Asia to North America, although some cables do wind their way down the Pacific coast from the United States and Mexico to various landing points in the southern continental United States. In fact, four years ago, Google partnered with Curie on its first fully private cable project, connecting California to Chile.
Google has not said when the Humboldt cable will be completed, but rather than go it alone like other recent submarine cable projects, the internet giant is partnering with Chile's Ministry of National Development and France's Post Office and Telecommunications (OPT) to lay the 9,200-mile (14,800-kilometer) cable.
Like other similar projects, Project Humboldt aims to improve data transfer around the world, working in conjunction with Google's other infrastructure projects, including a local data center in Chile - all in an effort to promise lower latency to customers while allowing those countries to benefit from more robust internet infrastructure.
Tech companies including Meta, Microsoft and Amazon have also invested in various internet infrastructure projects, and the four companies, along with Google, are said to own or lease about half of the undersea cable bandwidth.