Google is going to build the first submarine fiber optic cable connecting Africa and Australia. The cable, called Umoja, will start in Kenya and pass through the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe before ending its land section in South Africa, which is home to Google's first African data center, located in Johannesburg and began operations earlier 2024.
It is understood that the laying of the land route has been completed, and the work of leading the cable to the Indian Ocean and to Perth, Australia is currently underway, and there is no definite completion time for the time being. Brian Quigley, vice president of global network infrastructure at Google Cloud, said that Umoja will help African countries connect more reliably to each other and to the rest of the world. For areas that have experienced severe network outages, creating a new route that is different from existing connection routes is crucial.
Tech giants including Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft have laid hundreds of cables in oceans and waterways around the world. The more cables and data centers there are, the better services they can provide, such as lower latency YouTube streaming and faster cloud computing data transmission. The submarine cable closest to the Umoja route is the Oman Australia cable, which will be put into use in 2022. Google has also invested in the Equiano cable project connecting Portugal with Nigeria and South Africa. Although Google has not yet announced the specific completion time, the construction of a typical submarine cable generally takes three years. Therefore, Umoja is expected to be ready around 2026.