MUSCAT - Google on Monday has unveiled Dhivaru, a new Trans-Indian Ocean subsea cable system that will connect Oman, the Maldives and Christmas Island, further enhancing Oman’s growing importance as a regional digital gateway. The announcement was made by Bikash Koley, Google’s Vice President for Global Networking and Infrastructure, who said the investment aims to boost the reach, reliability and resilience of the company’s global network as demand for AI-driven services accelerates.

The Dhivaru system expands the infrastructure supporting rapidly growing platforms such as Vertex AI and Gemini, which depend heavily on low-latency and high-availability international connectivity.

For Oman, the new cable adds another layer of network diversity at a time when cloud adoption, fintech services and AI-powered applications are gaining pace in line with Oman Vision 2040. As more subsea systems route traffic through Oman, the country continues to cement its status as a critical junction between Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The country already hosts several major subsea cables, including the Oman Australia Cable (OAC), which links Muscat to Perth; the 2Africa cable, landing at Barka and Salalah; and global systems such as the Europe–India Gateway (EIG) and TGN-Gulf.

In 2025, Ooredoo strengthened this position with the launch of the Salalah Data Centre and Cable Landing Station, now a key node for hyperscale interconnections. The addition of Dhivaru will give Oman further international redundancy, reduce the risk of service disruptions and support growth in digital trade corridors across the region.

As part of the same initiative, Google will also establish two connectivity hubs in the Maldives and Christmas Island.

These hubs will provide cable switching, content caching and colocation capabilities. Although the hubs are outside Oman, the Sultanate of Oman will benefit from their functions through improved routing resilience and faster access to Google services. Cable switching allows traffic to automatically reroute during faults, while content caching stores popular data closer to end users, helping deliver smoother performance for cloud and AI services used by Omani businesses and consumers.

Oman has also taken regulatory steps to protect and support subsea infrastructure. The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has issued a framework to safeguard submarine cables in territorial waters, ensuring secure operations and enhancing investor confidence. The country’s geographic location — coupled with landing points in Muscat, Barka and Salalah — positions it as a preferred destination for new systems seeking diverse and secure routes across the Indian Ocean.

Google’s Dhivaru cable is expected to reinforce this momentum, bolstering Oman’s ambition to become a regional digital and technological hub. With global hyperscalers increasingly targeting the wider Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Oceania markets, Oman stands to benefit from increased traffic flows, investment in digital infrastructure and new opportunities for data-driven industries.

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