GCP – This bears repeating: Introducing the Echo subsea cable

It’s an old story, but one that bears repeating: Google works hard to build infrastructure that connects people, geographies, and businesses. Today, we’re announcing Google’s investment in Echo, a new subsea cable from the United States to Asia. Echo will run from Eureka, California to Singapore, with a stop-over in Guam, with plans to also land in Indonesia. Additional landings are possible in the future. 

Echo will be the first-ever cable to directly connect the U.S. to Singapore with direct fiber pairs over an express route. It will decrease latency for users connecting to applications running the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions in the area, home to some of the world’s most vibrant financial and technology centers. 

Infrastructure investments such as these can have a substantial, measurable impact on regional economic activity. For instance, according to a recent study of Google’s APAC network infrastructure between 2010 and 2019, network investment there led to 1.1 million additional jobs and an extra $430 billion (USD) in aggregate GDP for the APAC region.

Echo’s architecture is designed for maximum resilience: Its unique Trans Pacific route to Southeast Asia avoids crowded, traditional paths to the north and is expected to be ready for service in 2023. We look forward to the expanded connectivity that Echo will bring to Southeast Asia, enabling new opportunities for people and businesses in the region.