Google is Building Subsea Cables Linking Africa to Australia

Top tech company Google is building subsea cables to connect the whole of Africa and Australia.

Google is preparing to construct the inaugural subsea fiber optic conduit to link the African and Australian continents. 

The announcement comes as the leading cloud hyperscalers compete for enterprise spending, with Google attempting to catch up to AWS and Azure from Microsoft.

It is worth noting that Google’s announcement coincides with extensive power disruptions in Eastern Africa ascribed to malfunctioning subsea cables. Google, a company that provides services to consumers and businesses through dependable connectivity, is attempting to position itself as the solution by capitalizing on this. 

With the designation “Umoja,” this novel cable commences in Kenya. It traverses several nations en route, including Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia, before reaching its terminus on land in South Africa. Notably, this landmass accommodates Google’s inaugural African data center region, which commenced operations in Johannesburg earlier this year. 

Google affirmed to TechCrunch that the terrestrial portion of the route is already finished. For that segment, Google collaborated with Liquid Intelligent Technologies. The cable’s conduit across the Indian Ocean to Perth, Australia, is currently under construction; however, there is no official schedule for its conclusion. 

“Umoja will enable African nations to connect more reliably with the rest of the world,” Google Cloud’s global network infrastructure vice president Brian Quigley wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “To maintain a resilient network in a region that has historically experienced high-impact outages, it is vital to establish a new route separately from the existing connectivity routes.”

Hundreds of cables traverse the world’s seas, oceans, and waterways, and major technology companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are acquiring a larger and larger stake in the infrastructure. The rationale is uncomplicated: increased cables and data centers enable organizations to deliver superior service quality to their clientele, whether it be faster data transfers for cloud-based enterprises or lower-latency YouTube broadcasts.

Currently, the subsea cable route most in proximity to Google’s intended Umoja route is SUB.CO’s Oman Australia Cable (OAC) commenced operations in 2022 and links Perth with Oman. Additionally, Google has invested in several cabling initiatives focused on Africa, such as Equiano, which establishes connections between Portugal, Nigeria, and South Africa. 

In an announcement earlier this year, the organization additionally declared intentions to construct an inaugural subsea cable that will span from Chile to Australia via French Polynesia, connecting South America and the Asia-Pacific region. 

Google has yet to specify when Umoja will be completed. Still, a representative told TechCrunch that conventional submarine cable construction takes approximately three years, beginning with the planning phase and concluding with its operational status. Consequently, this cable may be prime-time-ready by approximately 2026.