Carlsbad hub proposed for undersea data cable between U.S. and Australia
Carlsbad hub proposed for undersea data cable between U.S. and Australia
Honomoana: Google's Pacific Architecture Reshapes US–Australia Data Connectivity
■ BLUF — Bottom Line Up Front
Google's Honomoana submarine cable system — operating under its Starfish Infrastructure subsidiary — is the cornerstone of a broader South Pacific Connect initiative designed to provide the United States, Australia, New Zealand, French Polynesia, and Fiji with physically diverse, ultra-high-capacity transpacific data routes. With a proposed US landing hub in Carlsbad, California, 16 fiber pairs capable of 16.2 Tbps per pair, and a minimum design capacity exceeding 259 Tbps on the transpacific trunk, Honomoana represents the most technically ambitious Google-owned cable to reach Australian shores. It arrives as Australia's data center market is experiencing its fastest growth on record — driven by hyperscaler AI deployments, with demand projected to nearly double from 3.5 GW to 7.2 GW by 2030. The FCC national security review process, triggered in December 2024, imposes conditions requiring compliance with a National Security Agreement between Starfish, Google, and the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Defense — reflecting the increasingly strategic character of subsea cable infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific competition between the US and China.CARLSBAD, Calif. — Permit applications quietly filed with the City of Carlsbad this past winter describe what would become the first international submarine cable landing in San Diego County: four fiber-optic cables threading through a horizontal directional bore beneath Carlsbad Boulevard, terminating in a 100-square-foot vault on California State Parks land just north of Palomar Airport Road, and then routing three miles inland to a now-vacant industrial building at Cosmos Court, near El Camino Real. The permits are routine in form. The infrastructure they authorize is anything but.
The system is known as Honomoana — from the Polynesian words hono (link) and moana (ocean) — and it is owned and operated by Starfish Infrastructure Inc., an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Google LLC. When complete, it will span 14,215 kilometers between San Diego County and Victoria, Australia, making it among the longest continuous optical subsea cable paths in the world. According to Federal Communications Commission filings, Starfish intends to install and test the system in US waters during the first quarter of 2026, with commercial operation of the Carlsbad landing point targeted for late 2026.
System Architecture and Technical Specifications
Honomoana is engineered with 16 fiber pairs on its transpacific trunk — a fiber count comparable to the most capable systems currently in service anywhere on the Pacific. Each pair is provisioned for a minimum design capacity of approximately 16.2 Tbps using current coherent optical technology, yielding a theoretical aggregate capacity exceeding 259 Tbps on the principal segment alone. In practical terms, this dwarfs the Southern Cross NEXT cable — which entered service in July 2022 with a 72 Tbps design capacity and was then the highest-capacity link between Sydney, Auckland, and Los Angeles — by more than threefold.
Beyond the transpacific trunk, Honomoana includes two branch segments to French Polynesia: a 115-km Tahiti Nui segment and a 156-km Tahiti Iti segment, each also comprising 16 fiber pairs. An additional branch extends to Auckland, New Zealand, and the Australian end of the system is designed for two landings — in Melbourne (Torquay, Victoria) and Sydney (Maroubra, New South Wales) — which also establishes a new domestic Sydney–Melbourne subsea route. According to Vocus, which holds a dark fiber agreement on the system, initial commercial capacity on the network will reach 20–30 Tbps per fiber pair depending on segment length, rising as coherent optical terminal technology advances.
| Parameter | Specification |
|---|---|
| Owner/Operator | Starfish Infrastructure Inc. (Google LLC subsidiary) |
| Transpacific Trunk Length | 14,215 km (San Diego County to Victoria, Australia) |
| Fiber Pairs (Transpacific) | 16 |
| Minimum Design Capacity (per pair) | ~16.2 Tbps (current technology) |
| Total Minimum Design Capacity (trunk) | >259 Tbps |
| French Polynesia Branches | Tahiti Nui: 115 km; Tahiti Iti: 156 km (16 pairs each) |
| Australian Landings | Torquay, Victoria (Melbourne) and Maroubra, NSW (Sydney) |
| Additional Branches | Auckland, New Zealand; Hawaii (via companion Tabua system) |
| US Landing (proposed) | Carlsbad, San Diego County, California |
| US Commercial Operation (target) | Late 2026 |
| Australia–US Operational Target | End of 2028 (per SubCo/Slattery January 2026 release) |
| Estimated Construction Cost | $471 million (per trade press estimates) |
| Vocus Initial Capacity (dark fiber) | 20–30 Tbps per fiber pair |
The South Pacific Connect Initiative in Strategic Context
Honomoana does not stand alone. Google announced the South Pacific Connect initiative in October 2023, comprising two transpacific cable systems — Honomoana and its companion, Tabua — together with an interlink cable connecting Fiji and French Polynesia. Tabua, named after a sacred Fijian whale's tooth, runs from the United States and Australia to Fiji, and Starfish stated in FCC filings its intent to complete the Tabua US landing in the first quarter of 2026. Together, the two cables create a physically diverse ring between Australia, Fiji, and French Polynesia, with pre-positioned branching units to enable future connections for other Pacific Island nations.
The South Pacific Connect initiative is furthermore integrated with the larger Australia Connect program, announced in November 2024 in partnership with Vocus, NextDC, and SUBCO. Australia Connect adds a separate Bosun cable connecting Darwin to Christmas Island — with onward connections to Singapore — and an interlink cable joining Melbourne, Perth, and Christmas Island. The Melbourne end of the interlink connects directly to the Honomoana landing in Torquay, creating an unbroken physical path from San Diego County through the South Pacific to Southeast Asia. The combined Australia Connect / South Pacific Connect architecture spans approximately 42,500 kilometers.
SUBCO, which operates the SMAP transcontinental system connecting Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, has separately announced a shared infrastructure agreement with Google to build coordinated cable landing facilities at Maroubra, New South Wales, and Torquay, Victoria, jointly serving both the SMAP system and the Tabua and Honomoana landings. According to Belle Lajoie, Co-CEO of Soda Infrastructure/SUBCO, the arrangement is designed to "harness shared infrastructure, enhancing resilience, speeding up project delivery, and minimising environmental and community impact."
— Vocus CEO Ellie Sweeney
The Demand Signal: AI, Hyperscaler Capital, and Australia's Digital Infrastructure Buildout
The commercial rationale for Honomoana is straightforward and quantifiable. Australia's data center market has expanded from 37 MW of total occupancy in 2005 to approximately 1.3 GW by 2025 — a forty-fold increase, according to a November 2025 market survey by the M3 Property Group. For the first time on record, demand exceeded new supply in both 2023 and 2024, producing a vacancy rate of approximately 12% across the Sydney and Melbourne markets, according to CBRE's latest analysis. The ITload demand is forecast by Mordor Intelligence to grow from 3.53 GW in 2025 to 7.18 GW by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of approximately 15.25%.
Hyperscaler capital commitments have been correspondingly large. Amazon Web Services announced a record AU$20 billion (approximately USD $13.6 billion) investment in Australian data center infrastructure in June 2025, while Microsoft committed AU$5 billion in October 2023 to expand its footprint to 29 facilities across Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra. Google itself launched a five-year AU$1 billion Digital Future Initiative in 2021, and an Analysys Mason analysis projected that Google's prior Australian cable deployments would produce a cumulative GDP increase of AU$98.5 billion between 2022 and 2026. Global hyperscaler capital expenditure by the five largest operators — Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle — is projected to exceed $600 billion in 2026, with approximately 75% directed at AI infrastructure, according to CreditSights data.
The bandwidth requirement that results from this investment is not incremental. Structure Research notes that both Sydney and Melbourne "have confirmed AI deployments landing" and that "the AI infrastructure wave is also expected to be a major tailwind for the Australia market." Against this background, Honomoana's 259-plus Tbps transpacific capacity is sized to meet a demand trajectory that existing systems cannot sustain without substantial supplementation.
The Existing US–Australia Cable Landscape
Understanding the significance of Honomoana requires a survey of the infrastructure it supplements. The dominant transpacific system currently serving the Australia–US corridor is Southern Cross, originally commissioned in 2000, whose Southern Cross NEXT addition entered service in July 2022 with 72 Tbps design capacity between Sydney, Auckland, and Los Angeles. Southern Cross is owned by a consortium including Spark New Zealand, Singtel/Optus, Telstra, and Verizon. The Hawaiki cable — a 15,000-km system linking Sydney to the US West Coast via New Zealand, American Samoa, and Hawaii — has been in service since 2018 with approximately 30 Tbps design capacity; it was acquired by BW Digital in 2022.
TeleGeography data cited by analysts indicates that international long-haul networks globally operated at an average utilization of 26%, with peak utilization of 44%, as recently as 2022. However, these aggregate figures predate the most recent wave of AI-driven demand. Industry analysts at ITK Research note that Google's FASTER cable — one of the higher-utilization transpacific systems — was lit at approximately 10 Tbps per direction against a 60 Tbps design capacity at its Oregon landing, implying approximately 17% utilization of design capacity. The implication is that new capacity is being added in advance of saturation, consistent with the planning horizons of 25-year-design-life submarine cable systems.
Vocus, the dominant Australian submarine cable operator, brings its own portfolio of existing and planned infrastructure: the 4,600-km Australia-Singapore Cable (Perth to Singapore, 60 Tbps capacity), the North West Cable System (Darwin to Port Hedland, 12 Tbps), and the Darwin-Jakarta-Singapore system. Through its dark fiber agreement with Google on the South Pacific Connect initiative, Vocus adds a new category of international capacity with physically diverse routes to the US — something its earlier systems did not provide, as all existing Vocus international cables run westward to Southeast Asia.
| System | Route | Design Capacity | In Service | Ownership |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southern Cross (SCCN) | Sydney–Auckland–Los Angeles | Triple-ring; upgraded to ~1.2 Tbps (legacy); NEXT segment: 72 Tbps | 2000; NEXT: 2022 | Spark NZ, Singtel/Optus, Telstra, Verizon |
| Southern Cross NEXT | Sydney–Los Angeles | 72 Tbps | July 2022 | Southern Cross Cables Ltd. |
| Hawaiki | Sydney–New Zealand–Oregon (via Hawaii, Samoa) | ~30 Tbps | 2018 | BW Digital (acq. 2022) |
| Honomoana (proposed) | Carlsbad–French Polynesia–Melbourne/Sydney | >259 Tbps (16 pairs × 16.2 Tbps) | Target 2026–2028 | Starfish Infrastructure (Google) |
| Tabua (planned) | US–Fiji–Sydney (US landing Q1 2026) | Not disclosed | Target 2026 | Starfish Infrastructure (Google) |
Regulatory Posture: FCC National Security Review
The Honomoana application filed by Starfish Infrastructure with the FCC was placed on public notice in December 2024. On December 20, 2024, the Department of Homeland Security notified the Commission it was conducting a national security review under Executive Order 13913 and requested that the Commission defer action pending completion of that review. This is consistent with standard procedure for Google-owned submarine cable applications: the companion Halaihai system — also filed by Starfish in December 2024, connecting Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands to French Polynesia and Chile — received similar treatment, with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration filing a Petition to Adopt Conditions on July 25, 2025, conditioning approval on compliance with a National Security Agreement negotiated among Starfish, Google, DHS, DOJ, and DOD.
The FCC in November 2024 simultaneously adopted a comprehensive Notice of Proposed Rulemaking initiating the first major review of its submarine cable landing license rules since 2001, prompted in part by the Salt Typhoon infiltration of at least eight US communications companies attributed to state-sponsored Chinese actors. The NPRM proposes, among other things, a categorical presumption against granting cable landing licenses to entities owned, controlled by, or subject to the direction of foreign adversaries as defined under Department of Commerce regulations — a regulatory posture that reinforces the strategic logic of Google's privately owned, US-incorporated cable portfolio in the Indo-Pacific.
The FCC's evolving rule set is directly relevant to the competitive landscape for the Carlsbad landing. The Carlsbad site was selected, according to FCC filings, precisely because it is physically diverse from existing Southern California landings. The coastal development permit required under the California Coastal Act is expected to reach the Carlsbad Planning Commission before the end of 2026. The California State Lands Commission has been designated overall project lead for environmental review under both NEPA and CEQA.
Installation Methodology and Survey Operations
An uncrewed surface vessel deployed from Australia in early February 2026 began a remote survey of the cable's seabed route. The vessel, with a range of approximately 2,000 miles and an endurance of up to 15 days between service intervals, is conducting the pre-lay survey that will inform the detailed installation plan. The cable ship that will deploy the final system is a larger, crewed vessel carrying the cable on a turntable — loaded with as much as 60 miles of cable per segment, which will be unspooled and subsequently spliced aboard ship as the installation advances. In shallower water, the ship deploys a plow-like trenching device to bury the cable below the seabed; in deeper water, the cable is laid directly on the ocean floor.
At the Carlsbad shore approach, a directionally drilled bore beneath the surf zone will carry the cable from the 3,000-foot offshore termination point to the beach vault, a method that avoids direct disturbance of the intertidal zone. Mark Zumberge, a research geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, notes that beyond a narrow coastal construction corridor, "once deployed, [submarine cables] don't make noise or pollute the ocean" and that "frequently they are buried in the sediment within a few miles of shore and beyond they are laid on the seafloor." He also highlights an emerging secondary utility: submarine cables deployed with appropriate sensor integration are proving capable of detecting earthquakes, temperature changes, acoustic signatures including whale calls, and other oceanographic phenomena through analysis of fluctuations in the optical signal propagating through the fiber.
Geopolitical and Strategic Dimensions
The broader South Pacific Connect initiative carries explicit geopolitical sponsorship. When Google and Vocus announced the program in October 2023, US President Biden and Australian Prime Minister Albanese jointly released a statement committing the US government and Australia, through the Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific, to provide $65 million jointly to finance submarine cable connectivity for Pacific Island nations that connect to the South Pacific Connect ring through its pre-positioned branching units. The statement framed the investment in terms of providing Pacific Island nations with "access to global markets and realisation of regional connectivity goals" — language that maps directly onto the ongoing US-Australia effort to offer Pacific nations alternatives to Chinese-funded connectivity infrastructure.
The deployment of Honomoana as a privately owned, US-incorporated system — with its FCC national security conditions and its DOD/DOJ/DHS agreement — underscores the degree to which major hyperscalers have become primary actors in building the digital infrastructure of the US alliance system. TeleGeography data indicates that as of February 2025, there were 570 in-service submarine cable systems globally, with 81 more in progress. Investment in new subsea cable projects is expected to reach approximately $13 billion between 2025 and 2027, nearly double the amount invested in the prior three-year period, according to TeleGeography figures cited by industry analysts. The world's largest hyperscalers are now the dominant investors in this category.
— Vocus CEO Ellie Sweeney
The Local Security Risk
The Carlsbad entry point has a layered threat environment that falls into five distinct categories, each with different probability and consequence profiles. Let me work through them geographically, from the water outward.
1. The offshore surf zone and buried cable segment (~3,000 feet offshore to beach manhole)
The cables come ashore in an underground directional bore beneath Carlsbad Boulevard and emerge into a 100 sq ft vault on California State Parks land just east of Carlsbad Boulevard, north of Palomar Airport Road. The bore pushes the accessible cable endpoint well beyond recreational anchor depth, but this segment sits inside one of the busiest commercial shipping corridors on the West Coast. The Los Angeles/Long Beach complex — the highest-volume container port in North America — generates heavy inbound and outbound traffic that passes directly offshore Carlsbad. The Traffic Separation Scheme for LA/LB approaches runs only a few miles offshore of San Diego County. Any vessel dragging gear or anchor in the approach corridor could intersect the shore end of the cable in water shallow enough for conventional anchor operations. This is exactly the mechanism behind the Baltic incidents — no special equipment required.
There is an additional, underappreciated threat specific to Southern California: the offshore kelp beds and commercial and recreational fishing activity close inshore creates a persistent low-level anchor and gear threat that is distinct from the commercial shipping risk. Carlsbad is a surf and sport fishing community; the near-shore zone is heavily used by small recreational vessels, dive boats, and sport fishing charters — most of whom would have no awareness that a cable is beneath them.
2. The beach vault on State Parks land
Cable landing stations may not have perimeter fencing. If they have perimeter security, it may only have chain-link fences and remote cameras. Submarine cable routes may not be patrolled on a regular basis. Technical and operational specifications may be publicly available. Local operating procedures may be widely known and easily obtained. The DHS Protective Security Division assessment from which this comes is blunt about the exposure of shore-end infrastructure.
The Carlsbad vault is on a public beach access corridor — California coastal law mandates liberal public access to the shoreline, and public roads are in close proximity to cable landing stations. The precise location of the vault — east of Carlsbad Boulevard, north of Palomar Airport Road — is already in a public permit application and reported in the San Diego Union-Tribune. There is no practical obscurity at this point. A motivated adversary — state-sponsored or otherwise — can locate it precisely from open sources. Physical access to the vault requires defeating a structure that, in the general industry pattern, is secured at chain-link or equivalent level. The vault also carries the power feed conductor at high voltage (±7.5 kV); emergency personnel must make sure that a station employee verifies that power has been cut off before attempting any response efforts near any underwater cable landing. This electrical hazard also complicates emergency response to any incident, adding time to any damage assessment or repair operation.
3. The 3-mile inland conduit along Palomar Airport Road
Vero Networks has applied for permits to install 4.3 miles of fiber-optic cable from the onshore hub in an underground conduit that will follow the public right-of-way along Palomar Airport Road and Yarrow Drive to an office building owned by Elkhorn Enterprises at Cosmos Court, near El Camino Real.
This is arguably the most underappreciated threat segment. A 4.3-mile conduit running along a public road right-of-way is accessible at any of dozens of points — utility access covers, conduit junction vaults, road crossings. Unlike the ocean-floor segments, there is no depth, no burial requirement, and no special equipment needed to access it. The conduit route follows a major commercial arterial that also serves McClellan-Palomar Airport — a County of San Diego general aviation and charter airport with its own security perimeter concerns but open airside access relative to commercial airports. The road is heavily trafficked with commercial, construction, and airport service vehicles, providing ideal cover for a "utility maintenance" approach that would not attract attention. Facilities along the backhaul fiber infrastructure connected to the submarine cables are diverse and not concentrated in any one particular location, which is normally a resilience asset — but the Carlsbad design concentrates the entire onshore backhaul into a single 4.3-mile conduit with a single terminus.
4. The Cosmos Court terminal building (Elkhorn Enterprises/Google)
This is where the cable transitions from fiber transport to active network infrastructure — the submarine line terminating equipment (SLTE), power feed equipment (PFE), and the network management systems that control the entire 14,215-km system are co-located here. Landing stations house network management equipment and power feeds, making them more accessible to threat actors. The use of remote network management systems in monitoring and controlling infrastructure creates another vulnerability that state-sponsored adversaries, ransomware groups, and other threat actors are likely to exploit.
The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence classifies the possibility of cyberattacks against cable landing stations as a "high risk" to national security. The SLTE building is in a commercial/industrial park near Palomar Airport — not a dedicated, purpose-built hardened facility. The character of the surrounding development at Cosmos Court is light industrial and commercial, meaning the facility will not stand out visually, which is a useful form of obscurity. But it also means perimeter security relies on standard commercial building standards rather than SCIF-grade hardening. The National Security Agreement between Starfish/Google and DHS/DOJ/DOD governing the Honomoana landing license will impose specific physical and cybersecurity requirements on this facility — but the details are not public.
5. The broader local threat context: proximity to San Diego's defense infrastructure
This cuts in both directions. On the protective side, Carlsbad is 28 miles north of Naval Base San Diego, within the area of responsibility of FACSFAC San Diego — the Fleet Area Control and Surveillance Facility, responsible for air, surface, and subsurface activity in the California offshore ranges, operating 24 hours a day. The USN's persistent surveillance of offshore Southern California waters is a meaningful passive deterrent against gray-zone maritime operations near the shore approach. Any vessel loitering over the cable approach corridor in an anomalous pattern would be observed.
On the exposure side, however, the density of high-value defense infrastructure in San Diego County makes the entire region a target-rich environment for foreign intelligence operations. San Diego hosts the largest concentration of US Navy assets on the West Coast, MCAS Miramar, Camp Pendleton, and multiple defense contractor facilities. Chinese and Russian intelligence collection activities against San Diego defense infrastructure are well-documented in counterintelligence proceedings. A transpacific cable carrying US-Australia military and commercial traffic landing in this environment is not isolated from that broader collection effort — if anything, the cable's proximity to established intelligence target sets makes it a more natural object of interest.
The compounding factor: public permit disclosure
The entire physical route — vault location, conduit alignment, terminal building address — is now in the public record through the Carlsbad Planning Commission permit process and the FCC docket. This is a structural feature of US infrastructure permitting, not unique to Honomoana, and some organizations document landing station locations with photographs and assessments and make this information readily available for free. Obscurity as a security control is not available for this cable's US terminus. The mitigation has to be physical hardening, monitoring, and rapid response — not secrecy about location.
Bottom line
The Carlsbad entry point concentrates three distinct attack surfaces into a remarkably compact geographic corridor: the near-shore buried segment exposed to commercial and recreational maritime traffic, the beach vault accessible from a public right-of-way, and the 4.3-mile single-path conduit along Palomar Airport Road terminating at a commercial building whose exact address and function are in the public record. The protective factors are the USN surveillance environment offshore, the NSA-conditioned physical security requirements at the Cosmos Court facility, and cable burial in the shore approach. The residual risk that is hardest to mitigate is the conduit along Palomar Airport Road — a single linear failure point between the ocean and the network, running along a public road, with no redundant path.
Outlook
The combination of Honomoana's extraordinary technical specifications, Google's integrated South Pacific Connect and Australia Connect programs, the accelerating AI-driven demand in Australia, and the explicit alignment of the initiative with US–Australia strategic goals makes this one of the most consequential submarine cable deployments in the Pacific since Southern Cross entered service in 2000. The 14,215-km transpacific trunk, provisioned with 16 fiber pairs and a minimum design capacity of more than 259 Tbps, is sized not for present demand but for the trajectory that analysts across the industry are now forecasting — a trajectory in which Australia's data center capacity may need to grow from 3.5 GW today to more than 7 GW within five years.
If the Carlsbad Planning Commission approves the coastal development permit on schedule, and if the FCC completes its national security review in a timeframe consistent with Starfish's stated installation plans, the first submarine cable hub in San Diego County will be operational by late 2026. For a city whose primary relationship to defense and national security infrastructure has historically been through the US Navy's Third Fleet and the contractor community supporting naval systems development, the addition of a strategic data communications node connecting the US to Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific will represent a meaningful expansion of its critical infrastructure role.
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