Meta plans to shatter a longstanding ceiling in undersea networking with Petal, a new transatlantic cable stretching roughly 7,000 kilometers between France and the United States. Once operational in 2029, the system promises one petabit per second of capacity, a figure that would mark the first transoceanic link to cross that threshold.
That level of bandwidth equals 1,000 terabits per second. To put it in perspective, Meta suggests it could handle simultaneous music streaming for three quarters of humanity. Marketing language aside, the scale matters because no single intercontinental cable has ever delivered this much throughput in one generation.
The technical leap comes from multi-core fiber. Conventional subsea cables rely on single-core strands. Petal uses two-core fiber, effectively doubling capacity per strand without requiring a proportional jump in power or physical footprint.
That constraint drives much of the engineering. Subsea systems pull power from shore based equipment rated at 18 kilovolts. Exceeding that ceiling would force a costly requalification of the entire ecosystem. Petal’s design stays within existing limits through Fan In/Fan Out devices and highly efficient amplification. Partners NEC and Sumitomo Electric Industries spent years qualifying the first petabit class transoceanic system. NEC handles manufacturing and installation as turnkey supplier, while Sumitomo produces the multi-core fiber. Orange supports the French landing site.
Meanwhile, hyperscalers have fundamentally changed who owns international bandwidth. TeleGeography data shows Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon now control about 75 percent of global capacity, up from almost nothing in 2010. AI workloads demand infrastructure that cannot simply be leased from telecom consortiums.
Meta has backed more than 20 subsea projects over the past decade, including the 45,000 kilometer 2Africa system and the $10 billion plus Project Waterworth. Petal adds a dedicated transatlantic artery with 5.5 times the capacity of Marea, Meta’s first Atlantic investment.
As a result, the cable industry now has a new benchmark. Competition from Google and Microsoft remains intense, with over $16 billion committed to submarine cables entering service through 2029. Whether two core fiber scales to four cores or beyond remains an open question, but Petal resets expectations for what intercontinental networks can carry.
