Google Dunant Submarine Cable
Google's private 250 Tbps trans-Atlantic cable featuring 12 fiber pairs and space-division multiplexing
Open it on the earth: cut a link, lose a siteWorkbook (DC Sim template v1.4)
The story
Dunant was Google's first private trans-Atlantic subsea cable, linking Virginia Beach in the United States directly to Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the Atlantic coast of France. Named after Red Cross founder Henry Dunant, the 6,400 km system went live in 2020 with 12 fiber pairs operating space-division multiplexing (SDM) from SubCom. With a design capacity of 250 Tbps, Dunant delivers high-throughput, low-latency interconnection between Google Cloud mega-campuses in North America and Western Europe without reliance on consortium consortium arrangements.
Notable
- Named in honor of Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross and the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
- First subsea cable to deploy 12-fiber-pair space-division multiplexing (SDM) technology developed by SubCom.
- Provides 250 Tbps of total design capacity spanning 6,400 km between Virginia Beach and western France.
- Connects directly into Google Cloud's global software-defined private network backbone.
Sites
| Code | Place | Role | Provider |
|---|---|---|---|
| VAB | Virginia Beach, United States | landing | |
| SHR | Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez, France | landing | Google / Orange |
Links
| From | To | Type | Capacity | Length | Year | Protected | Est. one-way latency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VAB | SHR | submarine | 250 Tbps | 6,400 km | 2020 | no | ≈ 45.0 ms |
Latency marked ≈ is our estimate from the great-circle distance × 1.5 at 5 µs per km, not the operator's figure.
Sources
- Delivering capacity and resilience in our global network with the Dunant subsea cable · Google · 2018-07-17
- Record-breaking Dunant subsea cable is now ready for service · Google · 2021-02-03
Part of the open famous data centers dataset (CC BY 4.0). Updated 2026-10-15.
What is Google Dunant Submarine Cable famous for?
Google's private 250 Tbps trans-Atlantic cable featuring 12 fiber pairs and space-division multiplexing
How many sites and links does Google Dunant Submarine Cable have in this dataset?
2 sites and 1 links, of which 1 are recorded as not protected. Figures are from the public sources listed on the page.