The system is part of the company's efforts to improve its cloud network. The announcement was made the same day that Google announced that its cloud division lost US$5.6 billion in 2020.

The system has been named in honour of Swiss businessman and social activist Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross and first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

A statement from Google said the project had been undertaken in co-operation with undersea data transport firm SubCom which had manufactured and installed the cable system.

Chris Ciauri, president, EMEA, Google Cloud, said: "Dunant is the first long-haul subsea cable to feature a 12 fibre pair space-division multiplexing design, and will deliver record-breaking capacity of 250 terabits per second across the ocean – enough to transmit the entire digitised Library of Congress three times every second.

"Increased cable capacity is delivered in a cost-effective manner with additional fibre pairs (twelve, rather than six or eight in past generations of subsea cables) and power-optimised repeater designs.

"While previous subsea cable technologies relied on a dedicated set of pump lasers to amplify each fibre pair, the SDM technology used in Dunant allows pump lasers and associated optical components to be shared among multiple fibre pairs.

"This ‘pump sharing’ technology enables more fibres within the cable while also providing higher system availability."