Meta Unveils Petal Transoceanic Cable With Petabit Capacity

Meta on September 21, 2026, announced Petal, a transoceanic subsea cable system designed to deliver 1 petabit per second of capacity between the United States and France, with the cable expected to enter service in 2029.

In its announcement, the company described Petal as the first subsea cable with petabit capacity to be deployed across an ocean and the next step in its subsea innovation work. The system will span approximately 7,000 km, or more than 4,300 miles, connecting the US with a planned landing on France’s Atlantic coast. Meta said the cable will carry twice the capacity of today’s best-in-class transoceanic cables and characterized the deployment as marking “the single largest generational increase in capacity of any transoceanic subsea cable system, ever.” According to the company, that capacity will support greater and more reliable transmission of data as demand for global connectivity grows.

Petabit Capacity and Multi-Core Fiber

Where traditional subsea cables carry capacity measured in terabits per second, Meta said Petal will deliver 1 petabit per second, a figure it compared to roughly the network capacity required for 75 percent of the world’s population to stream music at the same time.

Petal will be the first cable system with multi-core fiber technology deployed at transoceanic distances. Meta said it adopted two-core fiber technology to achieve the petabit capacity and pointed readers to its engineering blog for the underlying technical detail.

Under conventional designs, the company said, carrying twice as much data means building twice as many cables and using twice the fiber, physical materials, and resources. Meta said Petal’s design enables the transfer of twice the data without a proportional increase in power or physical infrastructure.

Meta is partnering with NEC, which it describes as a specialist in subsea cable systems, to develop Petal. Sumitomo Electric Industries, which Meta describes as one of the world’s leading fiber producers, is also working on the project, and French telecommunications company Orange is supporting plans to land the cable on France’s Atlantic coast.

Meta describes subsea cables as the global internet’s most critical physical infrastructure and said they carry approximately 99 percent of intercontinental traffic, spanning personal messages on WhatsApp, breaking news accessed online, and shared cultural moments. As demand for digital services accelerates, the company said, so does demand for the submarine cables that link continents, and it framed such investment as expanding access to digital services for people and businesses around the world.

Meta’s Subsea Cable Investments

Meta describes itself as one of the world’s largest investors in subsea cable infrastructure, with investments in more than 20 subsea cable projects and hundreds of thousands of kilometers of cable deployed around the world.

The largest project it has announced is Project Waterworth, unveiled on February 14, 2025, in an engineering post. Meta said Waterworth will reach five major continents and span over 50,000 km, longer than the Earth’s circumference, describing it at the time as the world’s longest subsea cable project using the highest-capacity technology available. The project is planned to deliver connectivity to the US, India, Brazil, South Africa, and other key regions. Meta characterized Waterworth as a multi-billion dollar, multi-year investment that will open three new oceanic corridors with the abundant, high-speed connectivity it said is needed to drive AI innovation, and said it would enable greater economic cooperation, digital inclusion, and technological development in those regions. In India, where Meta said it has already seen significant growth and investment in digital infrastructure, the company said Waterworth will help accelerate that progress and support the country’s digital economy plans.

In the February 2025 post, Meta said it had developed more than 20 subsea cables with partners over the previous decade, including multiple deployments of 24-fiber-pair cables, compared with the typical 8 to 16 fiber pairs of other new systems. The company said Waterworth’s routing maximizes the amount of cable laid in deep water, at depths of up to 7,000 meters, and uses enhanced burial techniques in high-risk fault areas such as shallow waters near coasts to avoid damage from ship anchors and other hazards. That post stated that subsea cable projects account for more than 95 percent of intercontinental traffic across the world’s oceans.

Meta said Petal “sets a new standard for what undersea infrastructure can deliver” and is expected to be in service in 2029.