Tech giant Google has announced a $1 billion investment in expanding digital connectivity across the Pacific that includes the Hawaiian Islands.

The latest phase in its Pacific Connect initiative — framed primarily as boosting data links between the mainland and Japan — involves the delivery of two new subsea cables, Proa and Taihei, plus links between them.

The Taihei cable, named after the Japanese word for both “peace” and “Pacific Ocean,” will connect Japan to Hawaii. Another cable, Tabua, announced in 2023 to run from the mainland to Fiji and Australia, will now be extended to Hawaii.

These high-capacity, hard-wired new links couldn’t come soon enough as older cables are retired, reducing both the number and resilience of our links to distant shores.

Hawaii’s role in global travel was once vital, a necessary refueling point between the West Coast and Asia. As aviation technology advanced, however, planes could bypass us completely. Many do today, but fortunately, we have a lot more to offer travelers than jet fuel.

Similarly, Hawaii benefited from solid internet connectivity as global telecommunication companies needed a waypoint in the middle of the Pacific to relay data another few thousand miles.

“Just like airliners, they stopped halfway to pick up power,” explained Garret Yoshimi, vice president for information technology and chief information officer at the University of Hawaii. “Now the technology allows the cables to go directly across without stopping halfway.”

Hawaii also makes the stopping of data here impractical, with regulatory uncertainty that drives away new projects.

“The uncertain permitting time and costs here are significant hurdles to allow people to think about Hawaii as a serious landing port,” said Yoshimi, a key leader in broadband initiatives in Hawaii.

The $300 million Hawaiki cable — which came online in 2018 to connect Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific islands through Hawaii to Oregon — faced significant expense waiting for local regulators to complete their reviews.

Google will have to work through the same bureaucratic process that Hawaiki did, but Yoshimi pointed out that Google doesn’t need to rely on a bunch of partners and investors — and has a vested interest in seeing things through.

“Folks like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they run huge amounts of traffic on a global basis, so it’s in their interest to build a lot of these cables,” he said.

Enlightened self-interest or no, Hawaii benefits from Google’s ocean-crossing ambitions.

New cables and investments need to keep up with older infrastructure going away. The Japan-U.S. cable, retired last summer, means the most direct path from Hawaii to Japan now goes through Guam — or to the continent, up, and over.

“It’s important to make sure that there’s a very long view, with rolling investments, so that we don’t fall off a cliff at some point and find out in 2050 all of the systems turned off and we only have satellite,” Yoshimi said. “It takes a while to build one of these.”

While Hawaiian Airlines made global headlines with its deployment of Starlink satellite internet aboard its trans-Pacific flights, physical cables remain the main way that a truly massive amount of data moves across the globe.

Yoshimi said the key is building multiple pathways to ensure everyone stays online.

“You need to have as many of these direct connections as possible — the network of resiliency now becomes critically important to bring Hawaii closer to everybody else in the Pacific,” he said.

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Ryan Kawailani Ozawa runs HawaiiCalendar.com, a Hawaii events calendar for the local tech and startup community.