Google’s next undersea cable will connect the US with the UK and Spain

Getting cat pictures across the internet requires lots of infrastructure, which is why Google is paying to lay another subsea pipe across the Atlantic. In a blog post today, the search giant revealed that it’s invested in a new line to connect New York with London and Bilbao.

The cable, named Grace Hopper, is the fourth Google-owned pipe after Curie (SF to Chile via Panama), Dunant (Virginia Beach to France) and Equiano (Lisbon to Cape Town via Lagos). It’s designed to bolster the forthcoming rollout of Google Cloud in Spain, as well as improve connectivity between the US and Europe.

Nestled inside the line is 32 fibers packing optical fiber switching that, Google says, will improve reliability and greater redundancy to prevent outages. The contract to lay the pipe was signed earlier this year, and Google is expecting it to come online at some point in 2022.

If you’re unfamiliar, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist who worked on the Harvard Mark 1. After the war, Hopper worked on developing computers both for the Navy and the general public, and laid much of the groundwork for the programming language COBOL. She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.