Tech giants Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) are expanding an existing partnership to lay a new subsea cable network along the Pacific Rim, nicknamed "Apricot."
Apricot is only the most recent of Facebook's subsea cable projects, with the company announcing the Bifrost and Echo projects back in March. Google and Facebook's partnership initially began with Echo, with Bifrost being solely the latter's endeavor. The project appears to be serving as a "first stage" for the wider cable project, with Echo running from the United States to Singapore and Apricot extending from Singapore to Guam, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
The cables will expand high-capacity traffic in the Asian-Pacific region, meeting the rapidly growing demand for 4G and Broadband and furthering the rollout of 5G networks worldwide.
"Together, [Apricot and Echo will] provide businesses and startups in Asia with lower latency, more bandwidth, and increased resilience in their connectivity between Southeast Asia, North Asia, and the United States," said Bikash Koley, VP of Global Networking at Google.
Echo and Apricot appear to replace previous projects terminated due to the Sino-American trade war. Facing political pressure from the Trump Administration, Facebook and Google had voluntarily terminated several projects that would have laid cables between the United States and Hong Kong before being linked to neighboring countries much like Apricot. The ongoing antipathy between the United States and China will likely keep any similar projects involving Hong Kong from being considered well into the future.
The two companies do, however, appear to be investing heavily in expanding Asian infrastructure, hoping to meet the rapidly growing demand for rapid internet speeds. To that end, recently, Google announced a plan to invest in further digitizing Indian infrastructure.