Details
- Meta announced Petal, a planned subsea cable connecting the United States and France across approximately 7,000 kilometers, with service expected in 2029.
- NEC and Sumitomo Electric Industries will develop the system, while Orange will support its landing on France’s Atlantic coast.
- Petal is designed to deliver 1 petabit per second, or 1,000 terabits per second, using multi-core, two-core fiber technology deployed at transoceanic distance.[1][3]
- Meta says the system will provide twice the capacity of today’s leading transoceanic cables without a proportional increase in power consumption or physical infrastructure.[1][2]
- The project extends Meta’s subsea strategy, which includes participation in more than 20 cable projects and Project Waterworth, a global system spanning hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
Impact
Petal targets the bandwidth growth driven by cloud services, AI workloads and global digital connectivity while reducing the need to scale cable infrastructure linearly with traffic. Its planned 2029 deployment could accelerate commercial adoption of multi-core fiber and influence subsea-cable research, supplier investment and transatlantic network planning over the next 12–24 months.
