AWS will be Google's Facebook neighbor on the new US-Europe cable

Last year, Google, Facebook, Aqua Comms and Bulk Infrastructure all agreed to set up a new submarine cable to connect to North America, Ireland and Scandinavia. (The only cable system linking the United States and Scandinavia today is the TAT-14, almost 20 years old, according to Telegeography.) Now Amazon Web Services is launching into action.

Bulk Infrastructure, a Nordic-based developer of data and fiber centers, said this week that AWS would use its share of future cable capacity. The Havfrue cable (whose name means "siren" in Danish) should be available online by the end of the year, allowing it to transmit 108 terabytes of data per second across the Atlantic, according to TE SubCom, the company that builds the system.

While they are developing the computing capacity of data centers that are exploiting their large-scale global platforms, the technology giants have become the main consumers of transcontinental connectivity and have been at the origin of most of its recent expansion. In some cases, not just leasing capacity on submarine cables to traditional telecom consortia, they have been directly involved in helping finance new cable systems.

Google and Facebook officially joined the Havfrue consortium early last year; Facebook and Microsoft were two of the three sponsors of the Marea cable, which lands in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Bilbao, Spain. AWS has invested in the Hawaiki cable, which lands in Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand; there have been other examples.

Havfrue will land in Wall, New Jersey; Lecanvey, Ireland; Blaabjerg, Denmark; and Kristiansand, Norway, according to Telegeography. AWS will use the US, Irish, and Norwegian endpoints, according to Bulk, the exclusive owner of the Norwegian branch of the future system.

As a Norwegian gatekeeper in Havfrue, Bulk will provide cable access from its data centers in Vennesla (just outside Kristiansand) and in Esbjerg, a city in western Denmark.

AWS launched its first region of availability in the Nordic countries (in Stockholm) in December. Its other European data centers are located in Dublin, Frankfurt, London and Paris. On the other side of the Atlantic, most of its traffic coming through Havfrue, New Jersey, is likely to be routed to northern Virginia, home to the largest cluster of AWS data centers.