Google, along with five Asian telecommunications companies, will be collectively investing $300 million for the FASTER Trans-Pacific cable.
The five Asian companies involved are China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI and SingTel.
"At Google we want our products to be fast and reliable, and that requires a great network infrastructure, whether it's for the more than a billion Android users or developers building products on Google Cloud Platform," wrote Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president of technical infrastructure on a post in Google+.
This need by Google, as written by Hölzle, is the reason for the company's decision to join in the investment of the FASTER Trans-Pacific cable.
The cable will be connecting major cities in the United States West Coast to two coastal locations in Japan. The designed capacity for the cable is 60 Tbps, which Hölzle describes as about 10 million times the speed of the regular cable modem.
Google's investment in the FASTER Trans-Pacific cable will join Google's other, similar investments in Asia, namely UNITY in 2008 and the South-East Asia Japan Cable in 2011, in increasing the speed and reliability of the Internet in Google's Asia users.
NEC Corporation will be the system supplier for the cable, which will showcase the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies.
NEC, one of the world's top submarine cable systems manufacturers, has experience of over 30 years, and has constructed cables of over 200,000 kilometers.
The cable will be starting at Japan's Shima and Chikura, and connected to nearby cable systems. The cable will extend to major location in the West Coast of the United States, which includes San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland.
"The FASTER cable system has the largest design capacity ever built on the Trans-Pacific route, which is one of the longest routes in the world. The agreement announced today will benefit all users of the global Internet," said FASTER executive committee chairman Woohyong Choi.
The construction of the cable will immediately commence, with a ready-for-service target date of the second quarter of 2016.
Google, as a company, needs the extra bandwidth that the cable will provide to its users. YouTube users are uploading hundreds of hours of videos to Google's servers per minute, at the same time as over 1 billion users operating their Android smartphones and tablet computers.
Google has similar projects to increase Internet speed and reliability in the United States, including the Google Fiber initiative that looks to improve Internet access. Google Fiber is now available in a limited number of markets.
