The Pulse
Meta’s Petal Cable Targets 1 Petabit per Second Across Atlantic
Meta says its Petal subsea cable will connect the United States and France with 1 petabit per second of capacity by 2029.
AI.info Team ·
1 petabit per second is the capacity Meta says its new Petal subsea cable will deliver across roughly 7,000 kilometers of ocean between the United States and France. The company announced the project on September 21, describing it as the first transoceanic cable designed to reach petabit capacity and the first to deploy multi-core fiber at that distance.
Petal is expected to enter service in 2029. Meta says the cable will carry twice the capacity of today’s most advanced transoceanic systems without requiring a proportional increase in power, fiber, or other physical infrastructure. The company is developing it with NEC and Sumitomo Electric Industries, while Orange is supporting plans to bring the cable ashore on France’s Atlantic coast.
Meta’s announcement calls the project the largest single-generation increase in capacity for a transoceanic subsea cable system.
Petal’s 1,000-Terabit Target
Petal’s stated capacity is 1 petabit per second, or 1,000 terabits per second. Meta says that is roughly enough network capacity for 75% of the world’s population to stream music at the same time. An engineering post from the company calculates the comparison using a 160-kilobit-per-second audio stream and approximately 6.25 billion simultaneous streams.
Subsea cables carry about 99% of intercontinental data traffic, according to the sources cited by Meta. That makes the system connecting the United States and Europe more than a capacity announcement: it is a large addition to the physical routes used for messaging, video calls, cloud services, and data transfers between continents.
Meta has invested in more than 20 subsea cable projects, including Project Waterworth. The company says those projects account for hundreds of thousands of kilometers of cable deployed around the world.
Why Meta Chose Two-Core Fiber
Petal uses a 24-fiber-pair design with two optical cores inside each fiber. Meta’s engineering team says that arrangement is equivalent to a 48-fiber-pair system in capacity terms, allowing the company to double the capacity of Anjana, its previously announced 0.5-petabit transatlantic cable system.
The design addresses a longstanding limit in subsea systems: adding capacity usually means adding more fiber pairs, materials, and power demand. Two-core fiber places two independent light paths inside the same strand while keeping the fiber’s outer diameter at about 125 micrometers, roughly the diameter of a human hair.
Meta’s engineers identify two manufacturing challenges: keeping signal loss low and preventing interference between the two cores. The company says Sumitomo Electric uses ultra-pure synthetic silica and controls the refractive index of the cores and surrounding material to reduce crosstalk between signals.
A New Repeater Design for 7,000 Kilometers
A transoceanic cable of Petal’s length typically needs about 100 repeaters to amplify signals along the route. Meta says Petal’s repeaters will use a fan-in/fan-out interface to convert the two-core signal into single-core signals for amplification, then combine them again after amplification.
The approach lets the system use single-core amplification while supporting the higher capacity of two-core fiber. Meta says Petal will stay within the limits of existing power-feeding equipment, which is rated up to 18 kilovolts. That avoids the need to qualify the wider subsea equipment system for higher operating voltages.
The result is a capacity increase that Meta says does not require a proportional increase in power. The claim applies to the cable’s design and infrastructure requirements; the company has not published a project cost or a detailed operating-power figure for Petal.
NEC, Sumitomo and Orange Supply the Pieces
NEC is serving as the turnkey system supplier and is responsible for engineering, qualifying, manufacturing, and installing the cable system. Sumitomo Electric Industries developed and manufactured the two-core fiber, while Orange is working with Meta on the French landing and the terrestrial connection into Europe.
“Achieving petabit-per-second capacity across a transoceanic submarine system represents a major technological milestone in the history of global telecommunications. This achievement reflects NEC’s sustained investment in research and development, combined with decades of experience delivering some of the world’s most advanced, reliable, and secure submarine networks that interconnect the globe,”
Eduardo Mateo, Chief Strategy Officer, Submarine Network Division, NEC Corporation
Jean-Louis Le Roux, executive vice president of Orange International Networks, said the project marks the first time the company will welcome a petabit subsea cable with dual-core fiber into its French infrastructure. Orange’s role includes the landing site and the terrestrial interconnection beyond the beach landing.
Petal’s 2029 Service Target
Meta is presenting Petal as a move from experimental multi-core fiber toward large-scale commercial deployment. Its engineering team says the system combines two-core fiber, 96-core amplification within each repeater body, and a 24-fiber-pair cable architecture to reach 1 petabit per second across the Atlantic.
The remaining test is delivery: the cable must be manufactured, installed, connected to the European network, and brought into service across a 7,000-kilometer route. Meta’s published target for that service date is 2029.