Google is building a subsea cable called Firmina, after a Brazilian abolitionist, to handle data surge between US, Brazil, and Argentina, due to launch by 2023
Context & Ripple Effects
Firmina continues a deliberate shift: Google began with Dunant across the Atlantic in 2018 — its second private intercontinental cable after Curie — then announced a US–UK–Spain route in 2020 before Dunant went operational at 250 terabits per second earlier this year. With Firmina, the company extends that privately owned footprint into South America's eastern seaboard, naming the cable after Brazilian abolitionist Maria Firmina dos Reis.
The timing matters because Google is no longer building alone: weeks later it joined Facebook on a multi-country Asia-Pacific system, showing hyperscalers now fund routes both solo and as partners.
First-order effects
- Google gains dedicated capacity for traffic between its US infrastructure and growing markets in Brazil and Argentina ahead of the 2023 launch, reducing dependence on third-party carriers along that corridor.
Second-order effects
- South American carriers and enterprises gain an additional high-capacity transit option once Firmina lands, pressuring incumbent providers' pricing on US–Latin America routes much as Dunant added supply on the transatlantic path.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Curie, Dunant, Firmina, plus the joint Asia-Pacific build — the intercontinental backbone increasingly becomes hyperscaler-owned infrastructure, shifting leverage from telecom consortia toward the cloud platforms whose traffic justifies each new cable.
The trend: Hyperscalers led by Google are converting leased bandwidth into privately owned and co-funded subsea routes, making cable deployment a core part of cloud infrastructure strategy.