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.
