Google’s newest data pipeline runs beneath the Atlantic to Portugal

Google has connected Nuvem, a new transatlantic subsea cable running beneath the Atlantic between Portugal and the United States, tightening its grip on the physical layer that carries its cloud and AI services.

The system links Sines, on Portugal’s southwest coast, with Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and adds Google to the small club of hyperscalers that build and own their own undersea cables rather than leasing capacity from carriers.

The route matters as much as the hardware. Nuvem, which means “cloud” in Portuguese, carries branches to Bermuda and to São Miguel in the Azores, giving Google a diversified path across an ocean that already moves most intercontinental traffic.

The company frames it as a way to serve the same AI and cloud workloads now reshaping its data centre strategy.

The technical figures are substantial. According to Google Cloud and detailed by Submarine Networks, Nuvem runs 16 fibre pairs, each rated at roughly 24 terabits per second, for a total design capacity of about 384Tbps across a trunk of close to 6,900km.

SubCom, the New Jersey marine-systems supplier, built and laid the cable, which Google owns and controls through a subsidiary called Starfish Infrastructure.

The Myrtle Beach landing came ashore in May 2026 at a station operated by DC Blox, with the wider system slated to enter full service in the second half of the year.

Nuvem does not arrive in isolation. It sits alongside Firmina, Google’s cable that reached South Carolina in 2023, and Equiano, which links Portugal to west Africa, forming a lattice of company-owned routes that Google can lean on when one path fails.

Myrtle Beach now hosts several such systems, including Meta’s Anjana cable, turning a stretch of the Carolina coast into a dense transatlantic landing zone.

Bermuda gets its first transatlantic fibre route out of the arrangement, a point local officials have welcomed as a way to become a mid-ocean transit hub.

For Google, the branch is another redundancy: traffic can be steered around a fault on the main trunk rather than falling back on rival carriers, which is precisely the kind of resiliency the company says drove the project.

The driver behind all of it is capacity. Training and serving large AI models pushes enormous volumes of data between regions, and the surge in AI data centre demand has left hyperscalers racing to secure bandwidth they control end to end.

Owning the fibre, rather than renting it, gives Google both a cost lever and a strategic one, insulating its network from third-party outages and pricing.

It also lets the company match cable capacity to its own build-out timelines instead of waiting for consortium partners to agree on a shared route.

This is well-trodden ground for the company. Google has been laying its own capacity for a decade, from a 26Tbps cable across Asia in 2016 to the Grace Hopper and Firmina systems in the Atlantic.

Nuvem’s 384Tbps ceiling shows how far per-cable capacity has climbed as fibre-pair counts and per-pair throughput have risen.

Portugal is the quieter winner. Sines has spent years positioning itself as a connectivity gateway between Europe, Africa and the Americas, and a Google-built landing station there deepens that role.

The Azores branch, landing at Lagoa on São Miguel, adds a mid-Atlantic waypoint that Google plans to share with its forthcoming Sol cable, a separate system that runs to Spain and Florida and should not be confused with Nuvem despite the overlapping geography.

What comes next is the switch-on at scale. Landing a cable is one milestone; lighting all 16 pairs and folding the route into Google’s global backbone is another, and the company has said the system should be carrying live traffic before the year is out.

For a business betting heavily on cloud and AI, another 384Tbps under the Atlantic is less a headline than a foundation.