In little more than a decade, Google has conquered the technology industry and become one of the world's most powerful companies. Its latest undertaking, however, may be one of its most ambitious: a giant undersea cable that will significantly speed up internet access around the globe.

The Californian search engine is part of a consortium that confirmed its plans to install the new Southeast Asia Japan Cable (SJC) yesterday, the centrepiece of a $400m (£245m) project that will create the highest capacity system ever built.

Google is undertaking the scheme with a number of Asian telecommunications companies, including Japan's KDDI and India's Reliance Globalcom. The agreement to build the submarine cable was first proposed three years ago, but negotiations finally came to a close on Wednesday as officials signed what they promised was a groundbreaking deal.

"We will now be uniquely positioned to provide our customers voice, internet and data services across the entire Asian continent," said Punit Garg, the chief executive of Reliance.

When it opens for business in 2012, the SJC will run 3,000 miles from Singapore to Japan - with branches reaching out to Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand and Guam. In total, it will consist of more than 5,000 miles of cable, sunk deep under the seabed.

The move is intended to boost the amount of capacity available for phone calls and internet traffic by bringing new. In turn, this should ease any potential congestion and make it easier for communications traffic to route around the world.

The SJC is set to break records by allowing up to 17 terabits of data to be sent every second - the equivalent of around 250m telephone lines, and large enough to allow the contents of every single book in the British Library to be transferred 20 times per second.

And as if that was not enough, the line is also upgradeable and could eventually run as fast as 23Tbps - space for another 88m phone lines.

It is not the first time that Google has made significant investments in the physical infrastructure that underpins the internet.

Recently, the company took a leading role in developing a parallel project to build the $300m Unity cable, which will run a high-capacity line from Japan to Los Angeles.

Demand for connectivity has grown drastically in recent years, thanks to increased internet traffic. Research company TeleGeography pinned annual growth between 2002 and 2007 at around 63% per year, and expects demand to double each year until 2012.

Earlier this year a new line running into east Africa was finally completed, promising to bring improved broadband to countries including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa.