They have changed how cables are funded, where they land, and how they’re designed. A couple weeks ago a new submarine cable linking US and Europe came online. The system, called Dunant, set a new record for data transmission capacity on a subsea cable, and that record has everything to do with one of its primary investors and users, Google, and a trend the company started more than a decade ago, which has since reshaped the submarine cable industry. The tech giant was first of the big four US-based hyperscale cloud platforms to start investing in its own slices of these transcontinental data highways. The group, which also includes Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, has invested roughly $20 billion in new cables all over the world, Alan Mauldin, research director at TeleGeography, told us in an interview for