Google And Facebook Announce Apricot Cable

Stretching 7,500 miles between 6 Asian countries

By Isobel Asher Hamilton
August 16, 2021

Google has announced a new project to lay thousands of miles of undersea internet cable connecting six countries in East Asia.

The project, called “Apricot,” plans to lay 12,000 km (7,456 miles) of cable connecting Japan, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore, according to a press release from Google on Monday.

The system should come online in 2024, it said.

Facebook will also partly fund the cable system, and so will a collection of regional telecom providers.

Facebook and Google have both already laid thousands of miles of undersea internet cable together, and are in the process of laying thousands of miles more.

Google announced in June it would lay a cable linking the US East Coast to Argentina, and both companies announced in March they were funding two cables hooking up the US West Coast with Singapore and Indonesia.

Over the course of 2020 and early 2021, Google and Facebook both scrapped numerous projects linking the US with Hong Kong in response to political pressure with the US government, which cited security concerns.

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