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Google just committed to laying thousands of miles of cable on the ocean floor to wire up the Americas like a fiber-optic nervous system. The Alphabet subsidiary announced its “Americas Connect” initiative, introducing three entirely new subsea cable systems, plus a new branch of an existing one, all designed to bolster the company’s cloud and AI infrastructure across the Western Hemisphere.
The centerpiece is a trio of new cables: Alisios, Canoa, and OlaLuz. Together with a fresh branch of the established Firmina cable, they will create interconnected subsea rings spanning the Pacific, Caribbean, and Atlantic oceans. The Dominican Republic emerges as the nexus of this entire network.
What’s actually getting built
The Alisios cable will link the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Chile, threading through the Caribbean and down the Pacific coast of South America. Canoa will run a shorter route connecting the Dominican Republic to Bermuda. OlaLuz will stretch from the Dominican Republic up to Florida, completing a Caribbean triangle of sorts.
Then there’s the new branch of Firmina, Google’s existing cable that already connects the US East Coast to South America. That branch will now extend into the Dominican Republic, tying the new systems into Google’s broader global backbone.
These new routes will support Google Cloud regions in Chile, the US West Coast, the US East Coast, and Europe. They also integrate with Google’s previously built cables: Curie, Nuvem, and Sol. The cumulative effect is a more resilient network spanning both hemispheres.
Why the Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic’s central role in this build-out is notable. Every single new cable and the Firmina branch extension lands there, making it the hub through which Caribbean, Atlantic, and Pacific routes converge.
Government leaders from the Dominican Republic, Panama, Bermuda, and Chile have all expressed support for the project.
The hyperscaler infrastructure arms race
Google has been in the private subsea cable business for over a decade. The Curie cable, which connects the US West Coast to Chile and includes a connection to Panama, was one of the company’s early marquee projects and signaled that hyperscalers were no longer content to lease capacity on cables built by telecom consortiums.
Google isn’t alone in this race. Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon have all made significant subsea cable investments in recent years. Meta and Microsoft partnered on a transatlantic cable, while Amazon’s AWS has invested in routes connecting Asia and Europe.
What makes Americas Connect distinctive is its focus on Latin America and the Caribbean, regions where cloud adoption has been growing rapidly but where network infrastructure has historically lagged behind North America, Europe, and parts of Asia. By building out redundant routes to Chile, Panama, and the Dominican Republic, Google is effectively betting that these markets will become increasingly important for cloud revenue.
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