Google and its partner SubCom announced today that the company’s privately owned Dunant submarine cable has begun operations between Virginia Beach, Virginia and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic coast. Google first announced this project as early as mid-2018. The project was named after Henry Dunant, the first Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Red Cross.

At that time, the project was expected to be put into use in 2020, but in addition to dealing with the complicated problem of long cables that span across continents, the project leader may not be prepared for the COVID-19 global pandemic.

The total capacity of this nearly 4,000-mile cable is 250Tb per second–or enough to transmit “the entire digital library of Congress three times per second.” Unlike some old cables, Dunant used 12 pairs of optical fibers, coupled with some technological innovations to maximize its bandwidth, to achieve these numbers.

“Google is committed to meeting the explosive demand for cloud services and online content, and this demand is increasing,” said Mark Sokol, Senior Director of Google Cloud Infrastructure.  “With record-breaking capacity and transfer speed, Dunant will help users access content anywhere and supplement one of the busiest routes on the Internet to support the development of Google Cloud. Dunant is a remarkable achievement, without SubCom and with the dedication of Google employees, partners and suppliers, they have overcome multiple challenges this year to make this system a reality, which is impossible.”

With the launch of Dunant, Google’s next cable going online will be the Grace Hopper cable between New York and Europe, based in Bilbao, Spain and Bude, UK. Google announced this new cable for the first time in July last year. It is also building in cooperation with SubCom. It is expected to be online in 2022 and will bring a total of 16 pairs of optical fibers.

In addition, Google is also building the Equiano cable from South Africa to Portugal. This cable should be online later this year.

In addition to privately owned cables, Google is also a partner of some consortiums that jointly build cable systems.