Google today announced a new private subsea cable project.

Expected to be operational by late 2020, the Dunant cable will cross the Atlantic Ocean, extending from Virginia Beach to the French Atlantic coast. It's named after Red Cross Founder Henry Dunant, the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

"Dunant will be the first private trans-Atlantic cable built by a non-telecom company," Jayne Stowell, Strategic Negotiator of Global Infrastructure at Google, writes in a blog post. "It adds network capacity across the Atlantic, supplementing one of the busiest routes on the internet, and supporting the growth of Google Cloud."

Google is working with New Jersey-based subsea communication cable service provider TE SubCom to design, manufacture, and lay the cable for Dunant. Once complete, the cable will offer "well-provisioned, high-bandwidth, low-latency, highly secure cloud connections between the US and Europe," Stowell rites.

This isn't the only subsea cable project Google has in the works. In January, it announced plans to commission three new cables in 2019 as part of a plan to expand its cloud computing infrastructure. Those include Curie, linking Chile to Los Angeles; Havfrue, connecting the US to Denmark and Ireland; and the Hong-Kong-Guam (HK-G) cable system, linking up subsea hubs in Asia. Curie, named after the scientist Marie Curie, will be Google's own private cable, while Havfrue, which is Danish for "mermaid, and HK-G are consortium cables the company is building alongside others.

In the future, Google plans to continue investing in both private and consortium cables. "Cables are often built to serve a very specific route," Stowell explains. "When we build privately, we can choose this route based on what will provide the lowest latency for the largest segment of customers. In this case, we wanted connectivity across the Atlantic that was close to certain data centers."

The company's future private cables will follow an alphabetic theme similar to its Android releases, and be named after influential innovators like Curie and Dunant.

"Our investments in both private and consortium cables meet the same objectives: helping users and businesses can take advantage of all the cloud has to offer," Stowell says.