Google says it's building Dunant, a transatlantic cable between US and France, its second private intercontinental cable after Curie, connecting US and Chile
Google today announced a new private subsea cable project. — Expected to be operational by late 2020, the Dunant cable will cross …
Context & Ripple Effects
Dunant is Google's second wholly owned intercontinental cable, following Curie to Chile — a shift from buying transatlantic bandwidth on carrier consortia to building it outright. The related coverage shows this was not a one-off: Dunant later went live at 250 terabits per second with partner SubCom (now operational), and Google followed with the US–UK–Spain route that became Grace Hopper and the South Atlantic Firmina cable to Brazil and Argentina.
The pattern matters because each private cable lands in a region where Google runs cloud regions and data centers — France, Spain, the UK, Chile, Brazil — meaning the company is wiring its own compute footprint rather than renting someone else's pipes.
First-order effects
- Google gains dedicated, self-controlled capacity between its US and European infrastructure, with SubCom winning the build contract and delivery due by late 2020.
- France becomes a direct landing point in Google's private network, deepening its European infrastructure presence without depending on telecom carriers.
Second-order effects
- Carriers that sell transatlantic bandwidth lose a marquee hyperscaler customer and now compete against one — pricing pressure follows as Google's fleet of private cables grows past Curie, Dunant, Grace Hopper, and Firmina.
- Rival cloud providers face a latency and capacity gap on key routes, forcing them to either lease more dark fiber or announce their own private cable programs.
Third-order effects
- If the cadence holds, subsea infrastructure consolidates around hyperscaler-funded builds, restructuring an industry long organized around carrier consortia into one where cloud providers own the ocean floor layer of the internet.
- Ownership of both compute and the cables feeding it gives vertically integrated clouds structural control over global data flows — a position regulators and governments increasingly scrutinize.
The trend: Hyperscalers are displacing telecom consortia as the primary funders and owners of intercontinental subsea capacity, wiring cables directly into their own cloud regions.