[dropcap]C[/dropcap]onstruction of a new subsea cable, the first to connect Africa with South America, is making progress, with Angola Cables, the company behind the project, announcing on Monday that ground has now been broken in the development of a data centre in Fortaleza in north-eastern Brazil.

Two key routes will run from the new data centre. The South Atlantic Cable System, or Sacs, will connect the Fortaleza facility with Luanda in Angola and is expected to be completed by mid-2018. From Luanda, the cable will connect onward to, among others, the West Africa Cable System (Wacs), which runs from Cape Town to London.

The second cable system, Monet, will connect Miami to both Fortaleza and São Paulo, also in Brazil, and is due to be completed by the end of 2017.

The tier-3 data centre aims to accommodate more cables from the “cable-dense region of Fortaleza”, Angola Cables said.

CEO António Nunes said the systems will also deliver the lowest latency routing between Africa and South America.