Google’s Empire Under the Pacific

Marker shapes

Eight layers, toggled in the sidebar

• Google cables — solid where in service, dashed where announced; heavier where Google is sole owner
• Cable-ship baseports and the maintenance zones they answer to
• Repair reach — the worst-served point on each route, sized by steaming days to the nearest baseport
• Landing points — all 37, sized by every cable landing there, colored by whether the territory is a sovereign state
• Google Cloud regions, the state layer and the license layer

Scope

Only Google’s 13 Pacific systems are drawn. Cable counts shown at a landing point are context for how crowded Google’s own landings are — no other operator’s route appears on this map, and no canceled route is drawn at all.

Six things to know

• The Pacific is covered by four maintenance agreements and, on the ICPC registry, 17 cable ships across 12 baseports — but one covers the whole South Pacific and one the whole Pacific coast of the Americas. No cable ship at all is based in Samoa, Fiji, Guam, Hawaii or French Polynesia, and none in South America. China holds three, all Panama-flagged, in a single estuary.
• Steaming days are transit only, assuming a ship idle in port with spares loaded. Tonga 2022 ran 38 days total with only 20 on station, so the real delay is roughly double what this map shows.
• The island routes are state-funded. The White House fact sheet of 25 October 2023 says the United States “is engaging with Google”. Australia put in $50m through the AIFFP; in Papua New Guinea the money runs through a mutual defense treaty.
• The cables are drawn from real route geometry. The systems Google announces in simple terms are not simple: Bulikula, announced as Guam–Fiji, runs 20,354 km and lands at eight points in five territories, Hawaii among them. Halaihai, announced as Guam–French Polynesia, lands in Chile.
• Every landing sits in someone’s jurisdiction, and 37 landings across 16 territories means a lot of someones — the United States at Guam and Hawaii, France in French Polynesia, Fiji, Japan, Australia, Chile. The densest node is Tahiti, not Guam: Papenoo and Faratea carry three Google systems each, and each is 9.5 steaming days from the nearest ship.
• Every landing requires permission, and they are granted by governments which may not agree with each other. These 37 landing points sit in 16 territories, each with its own licensing regime: Washington decides whose equipment may touch a US-landing cable and required Google to diversify its Asian interconnection; Canberra funds the island routes and reserves a joint say over who else builds in Papua New Guinea; Paris governs Tahiti, the node the Central Pacific ring pivots on. Google filed for three Hong Kong cables and built none; Taiwan and the Philippines were granted because they carried no PRC ownership.