Meta Unveils Petal, a New Transatlantic Cable
Meta has announced plans to build Petal, a new undersea cable connecting the United States and France that will be capable of carrying 1 petabit per second (1 Pbps) of data.
The technology company said the approximately 7,000-kilometre (4,300-mile) cable will be the first transoceanic subsea system designed to deliver petabit-scale capacity.
Meta expects Petal to enter service in 2029. The company says the system will provide roughly twice the capacity of today's most advanced transoceanic cables without requiring a proportional increase in power consumption or physical infrastructure.
The project is being developed with NEC and Sumitomo Electric Industries, while French telecommunications company Orange is supporting plans to land the cable on France's Atlantic coast.
What Does 1 Petabit Per Second Mean?
A petabit is an enormous unit of digital information.
1 petabit per second equals 1,000 terabits per second.
That means Petal is being designed to move 1,000 terabits of information across the Atlantic every second.
Meta says the capacity would be roughly equivalent to allowing 75% of the world's population to stream music simultaneously, based on the company's calculations.
The figure is particularly significant because international internet traffic depends heavily on subsea infrastructure.
Meta says approximately 99% of intercontinental data traffic travels through submarine cables laid across the world's oceans. These systems carry everything from messaging and video calls to cloud services, business communications and other internet traffic.
Petal Will Use Multi-Core Fibre Technology
One of the key features of Petal is its use of multi-core optical fibre at transoceanic scale.
Traditional optical fibre generally uses a single core to carry light signals. Petal is being designed with two-core fibre, allowing more data to be transmitted through the same physical fibre infrastructure.
Meta's engineering team says the system will use 24 fibre pairs with two cores per fibre, effectively providing the equivalent of 48 conventional fibre pairs in terms of the number of cores available for transmission.
The approach allows Petal to significantly increase capacity without simply doubling the amount of physical cable, materials and power infrastructure.
According to Meta, Petal will deliver twice the capacity of the company's previous high-capacity transatlantic system, Anjana, which has approximately 0.5 petabits per second of capacity.
A Major Upgrade to Transatlantic Connectivity
The United States-France route is one of the world's important digital corridors.
North America and Europe host major technology companies, financial institutions, cloud infrastructure, data centres and internet exchanges. A high-capacity connection between the two regions can therefore provide additional bandwidth and network resilience as demand for digital services grows.
Meta says Petal is intended to strengthen the digital infrastructure supporting communications between Europe and North America.
The company has increasingly invested in subsea cables as internet usage and demand for data-intensive applications continue to grow.
Petal represents another step in that broader infrastructure strategy.
Meta Is Investing Heavily in Subsea Cables
Petal is not Meta's first major subsea cable project.
The company says it has invested in more than 20 subsea cable projects, with its portfolio including systems such as Marea, Amitié and Anjana. Collectively, these projects involve hundreds of thousands of kilometres of submarine cable infrastructure around the world.
Meta's interest in subsea infrastructure is closely connected to the enormous amount of data generated and transmitted through its services.
The company operates platforms including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, while also making major investments in artificial intelligence.
Those businesses require large-scale data centre and network infrastructure capable of moving huge quantities of information reliably between regions.
AI Is Increasing Demand for Data Infrastructure
The announcement comes as technology companies continue to expand their artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Modern AI systems require significant computing resources and generate substantial volumes of data. Training, deploying and operating large AI models can involve data moving between data centres and other infrastructure across different regions.
Meta has been expanding its infrastructure specifically to support its AI ambitions, including specialised computing hardware, data centres and high-performance networks.
The company has described its infrastructure strategy as an effort to prepare for an AI-driven future.
Petal is therefore part of a much broader infrastructure investment rather than simply a conventional internet cable project.
Its very high capacity could provide additional network resources as Meta's digital services and AI workloads continue to expand.
NEC and Sumitomo Electric Involved in the Project
Meta is working with established companies in the subsea and fibre-optics industries to develop Petal.
NEC is involved in the subsea cable system, while Sumitomo Electric Industries is supplying the specialised optical fibre technology.
Orange is working with Meta on the French landing of the cable and its connection to the European terrestrial network.
Sumitomo Electric, NEC and Meta described Petal as the world's first commercial petabit optical submarine cable system in their joint announcement.
The project is expected to commence operations in 2029.
Why Subsea Cables Matter
Although they are largely invisible to internet users, submarine cables form a fundamental part of the global digital economy.
When someone sends a message from one continent to another, participates in a video call, accesses a website hosted overseas or uses an international cloud service, the underlying data may travel through fibre-optic cables laid on the ocean floor.
This makes capacity, redundancy and reliability important considerations for technology companies and telecommunications providers.
Damage to major subsea cables can disrupt connectivity, slow traffic or force networks to reroute data through alternative systems.
Additional cables can therefore provide more capacity while also contributing to network resilience.
Meta says Petal is designed to provide greater and more reliable transmission capacity as global demand for connectivity increases.
Petal Is Still Years Away From Service
Despite the scale of the announcement, Petal is not yet an operational cable.
Meta currently expects the system to enter service in 2029, meaning construction, manufacturing, installation and testing still lie ahead.
The 1-petabit-per-second figure is the cable's planned capacity rather than capacity already demonstrated by an operating system.
Once completed, however, Meta expects Petal to represent a major step forward in transatlantic subsea connectivity.
The company describes the project as the largest generational increase in capacity of any transoceanic subsea cable system.
Meta's Growing Infrastructure Footprint
The Petal announcement reinforces Meta's position as one of the world's major private investors in digital infrastructure.
Beyond its social media platforms, Meta is increasingly building and controlling infrastructure that supports its global services.
Subsea cables form one part of that strategy, alongside data centres, AI computing systems, custom chips and high-speed networking.
The company's infrastructure investments reflect the increasing importance of physical systems underneath online services.
While users experience the internet primarily through applications and websites, enormous amounts of physical infrastructure are required to move the data behind those services.
Petal is an example of that infrastructure being pushed toward a new capacity level.
What Comes Next
The next stages of the project will involve developing and deploying the cable across the Atlantic, establishing its landing infrastructure in France and connecting it to terrestrial networks.
If construction proceeds according to schedule, Petal is expected to begin service in 2029.
At that point, Meta says the system will provide 1 petabit per second of transatlantic capacity between the United States and France.
The project also illustrates how the next phase of internet infrastructure is increasingly being shaped by demand for AI, cloud computing and other data-intensive services.
With international data traffic continuing to grow, companies such as Meta are investing in higher-capacity systems designed to support the next generation of digital services.
For now, Petal remains a project under development, but its planned specifications make it one of the most ambitious transatlantic subsea cable systems announced to date.
