Tahiti to host five trans-Pacific undersea cables

French Polynesia is set to host as many as five of the recently-announced trans-Pacific Google undersea cables, President Moetai Brotherson, who is also minister for the digital economy, confirmed.

"We have one that links us to Chile, one coming from the US West Coast, a third one to Guam, a fourth one to Fiji and the fifth one to Australia", he told local Tahiti Nui TV.

Under the same project, the cost of building landing stations and data centres for those cables is to be taken care of by Google, he added.

As part of the so-called South Pacific Connect initiative, which aims to enhance reliability and resilience of digital connectivity, works should begin in the next few months and are set to be completed by 2026.

Other plans include building a digital engineers' academy to train future IT specialists with possible ramifications in artificial intelligence.

Google vice president of global networks Brian Quigley, on his blog, recently revealed what the new network of cables linking the Pacific islands, the US, and Australia will look like.