Why Are the Hyperscalers Building So Many Cables With Weird Routing?

Google is a good example. The Umoja cable directly links South Africa to Australia. Humboldt links Chile to Australia. There is also a new planned cable directly linking the Indian East Coast to South Africa. No carrier consortium would ever entertain lighting such routes. 

The answer is simple. As Google revenues become bigger and bigger, the opportunity cost per millisecond of any network disruption rises. More money is lost per unit of time and hence it makes sense to plough more resources into resiliency. As economists say, marginal benefit exceeds marginal cost. Google isn't building South Africa to India because there is a flood of traffic between the two countries. A key reason to do is greater routing options and hence a more stable network.

The other part of the answer is Google's cloud aspirations. Its current global market share is 15% versus Microsoft at 20% and Amazon's 28%. In other words, it is playing catch up. Now Amazon has most of the Fortune 100 customers. It will be difficult due to cloud switching costs for Google to take many of those huge corporate accounts. So Google is focusing on the developing world where cloud demand is growing rapidly and there is no clear vendor leader.

A third factor is that Google has apparently decided to place many of its cloud data centres in Australia because the country has strong rule of law, ample space, and power. Google can provide cloud services for the Pacific and Southeast Asia using Australia as the storage and computing facilities.

A fourth and final factor is that Google is likely to back up its customer's cloud data in a given country by sending a copy to another country as opposed the less resilient approach of mirroring data among cloud data centers in the same metropolitan area or country. For example, the best way to protect the data of its Indian costumers might be to keep a copy in South Africa or Australia.

Map of Google's India Connect Fibre Optic Subsea Cable Project

Map of Google's Umoja Subsea Cable Project

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