The 7,000km system was announced in July 2020 and connects New York, US; Bude, Cornwall in the US and Bilbao, Spain.
The news follows the successful landing of the system in Bilbao earlier this month with plans for the system to become ready for service in 2022.
Partnering with SubCom, the Grace Hopper cable will feature 16 fibre pairs, 32 fibres in total. Both Google and Subcom engineers have collaborated on incorporating novel optical fibre switching into the cable, for increased network reliability, enabling Google to better move traffic around outages.
Additionally, the cable will use fibre switching,” which enables Google to better move traffic around outages for increased reliability.
This new switching architecture also provides optimal levels of network flexibility and resilience to adjust to unforeseen failures or traffic patterns and will integrate the upcoming Google Cloud region in Madrid into its global infrastructure.
In a blog post, Jayne Stowell, Strategic Negotiator of Global Infrastructure at Google Cloud, said, "The cable will improve the resilience of the Google network that underpins our consumer and enterprise products."
"As our first Google-funded cable to the U.K., Grace Hopper is part of our ongoing investment in the country, supporting users who rely on our products and customers using our tools to grow their business," she added.
Overall, the company says that the contribution of the technology sector to the UK economy has grown 7% year on year since 2016. With UK-based venture capital investment rated 3rd globally, reaching a record high of $15 billion in 2020 and 10% of all current UK job vacancies are in tech roles, and the number of people employed in the tech sector has grown 40% in two years.
In addition, the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic in creating a digital new-normal means cable systems such as Grace Hopper enable Google to "plan and prepare for the future capacity needs of our customers".
