Meta's Petal Cable to Deliver Petabit Capacity Across Atlantic

Meta has unveiled plans for Petal, a subsea cable system that will become the first to achieve petabit-per-second capacity across transoceanic distances. The infrastructure project represents the largest single-generation capacity increase for any transoceanic cable system to date.

The cable will stretch approximately 7,000 kilometers between the United States and France's Atlantic coast, with service expected to begin in 2029. Meta is developing Petal in partnership with NEC, a subsea cable systems specialist, and Sumitomo Electric Industries, working with French telecommunications provider Orange on the landing infrastructure.

Why it matters

Subsea cables carry roughly 99% of intercontinental internet traffic, making them critical infrastructure for global connectivity. As AI workloads and digital services expand, demand for transoceanic bandwidth is accelerating. Petal's capacity leap—from terabits to a full petabit per second—addresses this growth without requiring proportional increases in physical materials or power consumption, setting a new efficiency benchmark for the industry.

Technical breakthrough with multi-core fiber

Petal achieves its capacity milestone through multi-core fiber technology deployed at transoceanic scale for the first time. Traditional subsea cables operate in the terabit-per-second range; Petal will deliver 1 petabit per second—enough bandwidth for approximately 75% of the global population to stream music simultaneously, according to Meta's calculations.

The design doubles data throughput compared to current best-in-class transoceanic systems without doubling the physical infrastructure. Conventional approaches to increasing capacity typically require deploying additional cables with corresponding increases in fiber, materials, and resources.

Meta's subsea infrastructure strategy

The announcement extends Meta's position as one of the world's largest investors in subsea cable infrastructure. The company has participated in more than 20 subsea cable projects, deploying hundreds of thousands of kilometers of cable globally, including the previously announced Project Waterworth.

These investments support Meta's services—WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram—which depend on reliable, high-capacity intercontinental data transmission. The infrastructure also benefits the broader internet ecosystem by expanding available bandwidth for businesses and consumers worldwide.

The Petal project details were first reported by Meta in an official announcement. The company has published additional technical specifications on its engineering blog for those interested in the two-core fiber technology implementation.