"This cable allows us to think about the future strategically, a future where we want to champion the digital transition and the energy transition and where we base our development" said Prime Minister António Costa at the ceremony for the landing of the Equiano submarine cable, which connects several African countries and Portugal.

The Prime Minister claimed that for this development "we are counting on partnerships with companies like Google, that has been investing in Portugal for 15 years and helps the country develop", adding that Portugal wishes to increase the amount of foreign investment and the investment by US firms.

"These cables also underline one of the security vectors for the Western world, democracies and the Atlantic Alliance: the need to ensure and strengthen the security of these links", he said. 

António Costa noted that "one month away from the NATO summit in Madrid, and when all eyes are cast on the need to strengthen the Alliance’s defence in the Eastern border, we cannot overlook the protection of the transatlantic space, the space of unity between Europe and the United States, which is the basis of NATO’s creation".

Digital Revolution

The Prime Minister began by recalling that "this industrial revolution is the first for which Portugal does not start at a disadvantage, whether through lack of natural resources or its geographic location. The digital transition is the first major industrial revolution where Portugal is an excellent starting point".

António Costa highlighted "the excellence of our human resources: 47% of Portuguese youths aged 20 attend higher education and we have fortunately overcome the structural deficit we’d accumulated over centuries. We have an average of 20-year-olds attending higher education that is greater than the EU average".

And "if we look at the number of recent engineering graduates as a percentage of our population, only two countries in the European Union have a greater percentage than Portugal – Germany and Austria", he said.

Fundamental resource

The "fundamental resource for the digital revolution – the quality of human resources – is a resource Portugal has, one in which we’ve invested, one in which we will continue to invest. As such, one of the fundamental priorities in our Recovery and Resilience Plan is the programme to boost training in science, technology, engineering, arts and maths, the essential know-how for the future".

For this reason also, "we have the InCoDe Portugal initiative, which aims to train a significant number of human resources in coding, so they may be at the service of this transformation".

"The digital transition places great part of the activity in a dematerialised, virtual world, where there is no centre or periphery, and the centre is truly each individual person", he noted.

Physical centrality in the digital world

Whereas "geographical distance ceased to be relevant, the digital world can’t exist without physical infrastructure, as we can see with this submarine cable And Portugal has a huge global centrality in physical infrastructures" 

This comes from "being the geographical point closest to North America and Brazil, as well as the European point closest to the African continent. The closest capital to Lisbon is Rabat". 

And it is also "for geographical reasons, a natural gateway between the European, African and American continents and, throughout history, Portugal has been a melting point of peoples, cultures and knowledge. It has the desire to keep being so", he underlined.

Communications cables

António Costa noted that "Portugal has been a landing station for several intercontinental submarine cables: the EllaLink landing station in Sines, we are a week away from the landing of Equiano, and soon we will have the landing of the 2Africa cable".

"This centrality is important as we are a bridge for the new highways", which are not a physical link, but which "allow for connectivity that generates huge opportunities", reinforcing the ease of communication between emigrants and immigrants, and trade.

The Prime Minister underlined that "these cables carry a fundamental good of the 21st century – cable, which are a good with huge potential. And Portugal has another advantage to become an excellent location for datacenters that will allow us to store and process those data".

This advantage, associated with the energy transition is that "datacenters are massive energy consumers and Portugal boasts exceptional conditions to produce renewables. In three years in a row we were able to set the lowest price of solar power in all auctions".

Portugal is therefore "the best landing station for the cables and the point where the datacenters can be set up next to the cables, as well as all the industries associated with them, because we are the European country that can produce renewable power at the lowest cost, cutting the costs of setting up and operating the datacenters".

The cable

The Equiano is a cutting edge fibreoptic submarine cable, headed by Google, which links Europe through Portugal to Togo, Nigeria, Saint Helena, Namibia, and South Africa. It will start operating at the end of 2022. 

The Ministries of the Economy and Maritime Affairs, António Costa Silva, of Infrastructure and Housing, Pedro Nuno Santos, the Secretaries of State for Digitalisation and Administrative Modernisation, Mário Filipe Campolargo, Internationalisation, Bernardo Ivo Cruz, Maritime Affairs, José da Cunha Costa, and Infrastructure, Hugo Santos Mendes, and the US Ambassador, Randi Levine also attended the ceremony held in Sesimbra.