US-based search giant Google is opening up a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region in Montreal in the first quarter of 2018.
Google also has plans on opening up Netherlands, Los Angeles, Finland and Hong Kong regions, before commissioning one private subsea cable and two consortium cables in 2019.
The sole private cable, dubbed the ‘Curie’ cable after the Polish-French Nobel Prize-winning Marie Curie, will connect Chile to Los Angeles. The Havfrue consortium cable will connect the US to Denmark and Ireland. The Hong Kong-Guam Cable system (HK-G) consortium cable will connect “major subsea communication hubs” in Asia, according to Google.
While the Havfrue and HK-G are infrastructure investments aimed at improving data transmission speeds for a variety of companies, the Curie cable is especially notable as it will make Google the first non-telecommunications company to build a private intercontinental cable.
“By deploying our own private subsea cable, we help improve global connectivitiy while providing value to our customers,” reads an excerpt from a January 16 Google blog post. “Owning the cable ourselves has some distinct benefits.”
Among these benefits is the fact that Google will be completely in charge of the cable’s technical specifications, meaning it can meet the company’s precise data needs.
“Also, once the cable is deployed, we can make routing decisions that optimize for latency and availability,” reads another excerpt from the same January post. This spending represents approximately $30 billion USD (roughly $37.2 billion CAD) that Google has invested over the past three years to improve its infrastructure around the world.
MobileSyrup has reached out to Google for more information on the company’s goals for its Montreal Google Cloud Platform region. This story will be updated with a response.
Update 16/01/2018: This story has been updated to reflect that Google will be opening a Google Cloud Platform region in Montreal, a topic the company has also discussed in the past.
This article was originally published on MobileSyrup