Meta announces Petal subsea cable with petabit capacity

Meta Platforms has announced the launch of Petal, a groundbreaking transoceanic subsea cable system engineered to deliver petabit capacity. Spanning approximately 7,000 kilometers between the United States and France, the infrastructure is projected to enter commercial service by 2029. Petal delivers 1 petabit per second of capacity, representing the single largest generational capacity upgrade in transoceanic subsea cable history, offering twice the throughput of current best-in-class cables without requiring proportional increases in power or physical space. Meta is collaborating with industry partners NEC and Sumitomo Electric Industries to construct the cable, alongside telecommunications carrier Orange to facilitate French landing operations. Notably, Petal represents the first transoceanic deployment of multi-core fiber technology. With subsea infrastructure carrying roughly 99% of global intercontinental data traffic, Meta's expansion across more than 20 subsea cable projects underscores its strategic drive to secure robust data pipelines to support expanding digital services and massive artificial intelligence workloads.