It takes much more than a local data center to extend a public cloud like Amazon Inc.’s into a new market. The undertaking also requires a robust networking backbone capable of linking the facility to the rest of AWS reliably, securely and with as little latency as possible. As a result, it doesn’t come entirely as a surprise that the company is becoming directly involved with the undersea infrastructure that makes such connectivity possible.

Citing an anonymous insider, Data Center Knowledge revealed today that Amazon has agreed to contribute funds towards the ambitious Hawaiki Submarine Cable project. The investment reportedly provides the last bit of capital needed to start laying down the pipe, which is set to achieve a length of nearly 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) after its scheduled completion in 2018. It will run from Sydney through Northern New Zealand, American Samoa and Oahu until finally terminating at Oregon, where Amazon maintains a large infrastructure footprint along with several other tech giants.

Its investment is set to make the company an anchor customer of Hawaiki in an arrangement that presumably provides more favorable terms than what later users will be recieve. And on the technical side, the cable will enable Amazon to serve up traffic from the Australasia region faster for its West Coast customers, most of which host their workloads in its Oregon facilities. The latency improvement should also be felt on the opposite end too, which will make it easier for the company to win over organizations in Australia and New Zealand from other cloud providers.

That includes not only local vendors but also bigger rivals such as Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc., which are involved in their own submarine communications projects. As Data Center Knowledge highlighted, Redmond is backing the New Cross Pacific Cable System, while the search giant is lending its resources to the construction of the upcoming FASTER cable. Their participation in this space will likely only increase over time as organizations continue to shift more workloads to the cloud and their networking requirements grow accordingly.

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