Google's Nuvem cable has landed in Sines, and it puts Portugal one hop from the United States
Google's Nuvem subsea cable has landed in Sines. It runs roughly 7,000km to South Carolina, calls at the Azores and Bermuda, and Portuguese operator MEO came in as a national partner.
There is a new cable buried in the sand at Sines and almost nobody noticed. It is called Nuvem, it belongs to Google, and it has just finished the hard part of the journey: crossing the Atlantic and coming ashore in Portugal.
What is Google’s Nuvem cable?
It is a subsea fibre-optic cable of roughly 7,000km, announced back in 2023 and now finally connected on this side. It carries 16 fibre pairs and was designed to move up to 384 terabits per second, which in living-room language means far more traffic than the whole of Portugal consumes. The route leaves Sines, calls at the Azores and Bermuda, and ends at Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, where the American end was pulled ashore back in May.
This is not Google’s first cable here. Equiano, linking Europe and Africa, started using Portugal as its European doorway in 2022, and the company is building landing stations in Lagoa, on São Miguel in the Azores, to receive both Nuvem and a second system called Sol.
Why did the cable land at Sines?
Geography, mostly. Sines is the westernmost point on the European mainland with a deep-water port and heavy infrastructure already in place, which makes it the obvious spot for anyone who wants the shortest path between Europe and America. The town has been quietly turning into the Atlantic’s plug socket, between the container terminal and the port’s logistics platform, and now it adds fibre to the list.
MEO joined the project as an investor and Google’s national partner, which means part of the capacity stays in Portuguese hands rather than simply passing through.
What does it actually change for people living here?
Day to day, very little. What it changes is resilience: the more routes there are between Europe and the United States, the less damage a dragged anchor or a mid-ocean fault can do. It also sharpens Portugal’s pitch for data centres, a business where proximity to fibre counts almost as much as the price of electricity — the same logic behind Microsoft bankrolling Mistral’s European data centres.
The system is not carrying commercial traffic yet. Testing and certification come first, the boring step between a cable that is installed and a cable that is in service.
By Oliver Grant
Image: Vitor Oliveira from Torres Vedras, PORTUGAL / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
