VALPARAÍSO – The long-awaited Curie Project, aimed to expand Google’s global cloud infrastructure, is finished. A 10,000 km-long subsea cable now connects California with Chile. The cable touches land in the Valparaíso port and connects with Google’s data center in Santiago.
Google’s Alphabet Inc. completed the 10,000 kilometer long subsea cable yesterday, connecting Los Angeles in the United States with Chile through the Valparaíso port, Google announced.
According to Google, Curie will be Chile’s largest single data cable and will serve internet users across the continent.
The cable is named after renown scientist Marie Skłodowska Curie. The pipe consists of a four-fibre pair cable (the first in 20 years to arrive in Chile) and is aimed to improve Google’s key role in the global network, to improve internet connection in Latin-America and to help Chile improve their fiber-optic network. The cable connects with Google’s data center in Santiago.
Google And the Curie Project
According to Venturebeat, the Curie project is not only important for Google, but for the internet as a whole. They state that “there are currently more than 400 undersea cables in service around the world, constituting 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles). Google is now directly invested in around 100,000 kilometers of these cables (62,000 miles), which equates to nearly 10 percent of all subsea cables globally.”
Furthermore, the Curie cable represents according to Google “the first private-owned intercontinental cable built by a major non-telecom company” and thus the first fully Google-owned international subsea cable.
For this year, Google announced the construction of two other subsea cables: Havfrue, built through a consortium, connecting the United States with Denmark and Ireland and HK-G, the Hong Kong-Guam Cable system, another cable built through a consortium, aimed to improve interconnection between the United States and Asia.
Editor-In-Chief Boris van der Spek is the founder of Chile Today.