Tourists to the scenic port city of Valparaiso, on the Pacific coast of Chile, have plenty to admire. Traditionally, visitors have swarmed across the city’s hillside to look at its vibrantly hued clifftop homes, street murals and sea views that inspired Pablo Neruda, the Nobel laureate. “If we walk up and down all the stairs of Valparaiso, we’ll have walked all around the world,” the poet once wrote.

More recently, the city has been hosting a new visitor: Google, which is building a connection with the world of an entirely different kind. Last month, the US technology giant laid the final section of a giant undersea cable, named Curie after the Polish scientist, that stretches 6,500 miles across the Pacific Ocean from Los Angeles.

Undersea cables are the vital unseen plumbing of the internet, carrying near 99pc of the world’s data and web traffic at close to the speed of light across the sea floor. By being hooked up to them, places such as Valparaiso and cities across Latin America and beyond can enjoy the economic fruits delivered by high-speed broadband connectivity.

The subsea fibre cable which arrives here is not unique. Around the world – from the remote island of Tonga to the shores of Cameroon – some of America and China’s biggest technology companies, including Facebook, Microsoft and Huawei, are forking out billions of dollars on similar underwater projects in a bid to gain an edge in a battle for control of the physical infrastructure of the internet.