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
Google is building a new subsea cable to get your megabits from Boston to Buenos Aires and back.
Context & Ripple Effects
Firmina is the next step in a buildout Google has been running since it announced three undersea fiber cables alongside five new cloud regions in Montreal, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and elsewhere in early 2018. Since then it has added a US–UK–Spain route and brought its second private intercontinental cable, Dunant, online between the US and France this February at 250 terabits per second.
What makes Firmina notable is direction: after Europe and Chile, Google is now pointing private capacity at the Southern Hemisphere's largest economies — Boston down to Buenos Aires — rather than leasing telco routes. Weeks later it would co-fund an Asia-Pacific system with Facebook covering Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and Indonesia, confirming that hyperscale content platforms are now the primary funders of new transoceanic capacity.
First-order effects
- Google gains dedicated, privately controlled bandwidth between its US East Coast network and Brazil and Argentina ahead of the 2023 launch, reducing its dependence on third-party telecom operators for South American traffic.
- Brazilian and Argentine users and enterprises get lower-latency access to Google services and cloud workloads once the cable lands, since traffic no longer rides shared carrier routes.
Second-order effects
- Rival cloud providers AWS and Microsoft face pressure to match private Latin American routes or accept worse latency economics serving the same markets, pushing them toward their own cable partnerships or regional region builds.
- Telecom carriers that sell transatlantic and US–South America transit lose pricing leverage as their largest single customer becomes its own supplier, compressing wholesale bandwidth margins on those lanes.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across Curie, Dunant, the US–UK–Spain route, Firmina and the Asia-Pacific system points to a structural shift: content and cloud platforms, not telephone companies, are becoming the default builders of intercontinental internet infrastructure, with national regulators and landing parties negotiating with Google and Facebook as first-class counterparties.
The trend: Hyperscale cloud and content companies are replacing leased telecom capacity with self-built subsea backbones, making private cable ownership a competitive prerequisite in cloud markets.