Sol: Google wants to connect Florida with northern Spain with an undersea cable

Google has announced the construction of another undersea cable between North America and Europe. The planned cable system will connect Palm Coast in Florida via Bermuda and the Azores with Santander on the north coast of Spain, the company announced on Wednesday. The distance between the two end points is 6840 kilometers as the crow flies. However, the actual route is likely to be longer due to the inclusion of the two islands and the swing to the north to reach the Spanish region of Cantabria. The US internet company has named the project Sol. This stands for sun in Spanish and Portuguese, which is an allusion to the cable system's landing points in warmer climate zones.

Brian Quigley, Vice President for Global Network Infrastructure at Google's Cloud division, has not yet revealed much about the project. However, he emphasizes in a blog post that the cable "will be made in the USA". The hyperscaler apparently wants to meet US President Trump's demand for production "made in the USA". According to Quigley, Sol will "strengthen the capacity and reliability of our growing network of 42 Google Cloud regions worldwide" once it is up and running. In view of the current hype surrounding artificial intelligence, the driver is "increasing customer demand" in the USA, Europe "and beyond" for AI and cloud computing services that require a lot of computing power and large data transfers.

In Palm Coast, Google will work with digital infrastructure provider DC Blox to lay the cable and build a new connectivity hub in the Sunshine State, according to Quigley. In parallel, the company will develop a terrestrial route connecting Palm Coast with its own cloud region in South Carolina. From Myrtle Beach there, Google is already spanning an undersea connection called Nuvem (Portuguese for cloud) to Sines in Portugal, which will also run via Bermuda and the Azores.

Nuvem cable runs almost parallel

The Nuvem cable, which was presented in September 2023, is scheduled to go into operation in 2026. Quigley justifies the partial duplication of structures with the necessary "investment in transatlantic resilience". Both systems provide an important terrestrial connection between the USA and the Iberian Peninsula.

Once completed, for which no date has yet been announced, Sol will be "the only fiber optic cable in operation between Florida and Europe", the statement continues. In Spain, the tech giant wants to work with Telxius to provide the necessary infrastructure to lay the cable in Santander and thus better integrate the cloud region in Madrid into its global network. Google did not provide any information on the costs, but they are likely to run into the billions.

Portuguese Infrastructure Minister Miguel Pinto Luz welcomed the initiative as it has the potential to provide redundancy to Nuvem. He indicated that cables with 16 fiber optic pairs are to be used. That is a high standard. By way of comparison, Meta's planned 50,000-kilometer submarine cable network Waterworth is to boast 24 fiber optic pairs.

(nie)