Google, Facebook, Pacific Light Cable Network partner to lay undersea cable between LA and Hong Kong which will transfer data at 120 terabits/sec, open in 2018
Jordan Novet / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Google's second move into owning trans-Pacific capacity in six months: it had already backed the 60 Tbps FASTER cable between the US West Coast and Japan, which entered service in June 2016. The difference here is the partner set — Facebook joins as co-investor alongside Pacific Light Cable Network, making this one of the first cables where two consumer-internet giants, not telecom carriers, anchor the financing.
The pattern holds across the corpus: by 2017 SoftBank, Facebook, and Amazon were lining up the Jupiter cable to Japan and the Philippines, and by 2021 Google and Facebook were jointly funding an Asia-wide system while Facebook and Amazon petitioned the FCC directly for a Philippines–California landing. The LA–Hong Kong project is the early data point where hyperscalers stopped renting bandwidth and started commissioning their own.
First-order effects
- Google and Facebook secure dedicated 120 Tbps capacity between Los Angeles and Hong Kong, insulating their traffic from carrier pricing and congestion on the busiest Asia-US route.
- Telecom operators that sell transit on the trans-Pacific corridor now compete against the very customers who once bought that transit.
Second-order effects
- Rival cloud platforms respond in kind rather than lease: Amazon follows onto Jupiter and then files with the FCC for its own cable with Facebook, while Google extends the model to France via the Dunant build with SubCom.
- Cable builders such as SubCom shift their customer base from carrier consortia toward hyperscalers, changing who sets route and capacity decisions.
Third-order effects
- If the sequence from FASTER through Dunant continues, the physical backbone of the internet consolidates into the hands of a handful of content and cloud companies — turning landing rights, spectrum, and seabed routes into competitive chokepoints they control end to end.
- Regulators such as the FCC become gatekeepers not just for carriers but for platform companies' global infrastructure ambitions, as the Facebook–Amazon filing already shows.
The trend: Subsea infrastructure is migrating from telecom-carrier consortia to hyperscaler-owned builds, with each successive cable raising both capacity and the owners' control over global data routes.