Google has announced plans to commission three new subsea cables in 2019 to support its Google Cloud customers.
The company plans to co-commission the Hong Kong-Guam (HK-G) cable system as part of a consortium. The HK-G will be an extension of the SEA-US cable system, and will have a design capacity of more than 48Tbps. It is being built by RTI-C and NEC.
Google said that together with Indigo and other cable systems, HK-G will create multiple scalable, diverse paths to Australia.
In addition, Google plans to commission Curie, a private cable connecting Chile to Los Angeles and Hvfrue, a consortium cable connecting the US to Denmark and Ireland [Figure 1].
Figure 1. Diagram shows existing GCP regions and upcoming GCP regions (Source: Google)
Late last year, Google also revealed plans to open a Google Cloud Platform region in Hong Kong in 2018 to join its recently launched Mumbai, Sydney, and Singapore regions, as well as Taiwan and Tokyo.
The Hong Kong region will be designed for high availability, launching with three zones to protect against service disruptions. The HK-G cable will provide improved network capacity for the cloud region.
As well as the Hong Kong cloud region, Google plans to open regions in the Netherlands, Montreal in Canada, Los Angeles in the US and Finland this year [Figure 2].
Figure 2. Diagram shows three new subsea cable investments, expanding capacity to Chile, Asia Pacific and across the Atlantic (Source: Google)
Last week, Google revealed that it has implemented a compile-time patch for its Google Cloud Platform infrastructure to address the major CPU security flaw disclosed by Google's Project Zero zero-day vulnerability unit at the beginning of the year.
The fix was implemented in December, before the disclosure into the series of vulnerabilities that can allow attackers to read memory stored on one of a variety of processors from Intel, AMD and ARM.