Key points
- Meta's Petal cable to link France and the US
- 1 petabit a second, 5.5x Marea
- First to run two-core fiber at ocean scale
- Meta frames it as Europe capacity, not AI
Meta (META) is building an undersea cable across the Atlantic that will carry a petabit of data every second, which the company says is double what the most advanced subsea cables move today over the same distance. The cable, called Petal, will run about 7,000 kilometers between France and the United States and is set to enter service in 2029.
A petabit a second is 1,000 terabits, or about 125 terabytes of data moving every second. Meta puts it another way, saying that is "roughly the network capacity required for 75% of the world's population to stream music at the same time." The company laid out the design in an engineering post on Sunday written by three of its network engineers.
How Petal doubles the capacity
The extra capacity comes from the fiber, not a thicker cable. Petal uses 24 fiber pairs built with two-core fiber, so two separate paths for light run through a single glass strand about 125 micrometers wide, the width of a human hair. That lets the cable do the work of a conventional 48-pair system. Sumitomo Electric developed the two-core fiber, NEC engineered and will build the system, and Orange will land the cable on France's Atlantic coast.
To carry that much without drawing more power, Petal uses a new single-body repeater design and stays within the 18-kilovolt limit of existing equipment, which spares the rest of the subsea gear a costly requalification. Meta says Petal is the first subsea system to use multi-core fiber at scale, and that the company wants to move the technology "from experimental to mainstream." Running one petabit through a single cable, Meta says, uses fewer materials than building two half-petabit systems.
What Meta is claiming
Meta has scaled up its Atlantic cables in steps, from Marea's eight fiber pairs in 2018 to Anjana's 24, the first half-petabit transatlantic system. Petal doubles Anjana and, by Meta's measure, is "the single largest generational increase in cable capacity of any repeatered subsea system, ever." The company says Petal carries 5.5 times as much as Marea, the first transatlantic cable it invested in.
Eduardo Mateo, chief strategy officer for NEC's submarine network division, called reaching a petabit "a major technological milestone in the history of global telecommunications." Jean-Louis Le Roux, an executive vice president at Orange, said the link arrives "25 years after the terabit milestone."
Petal is one more piece of the physical network Meta is paying to build. Meta is also spending heavily on data centers, but did not tie Petal directly to AI in Sunday's post. The company described the cable as added capacity and resilience for Europe. The company did not say what Petal will cost, and the stock closed at $665.75 on Friday.
