Meta’s planned Petal subsea cable will connect the United States and France across 7,000 kilometres of ocean, with operations scheduled to begin in 2029. Designed for one petabit per second—equivalent to one million gigabits—it could transport roughly 25,000 high-definition films’ worth of data every second. Meta says it will be the first transoceanic cable to achieve petabit capacity, doubling that of comparable existing systems.
Rather than increasing the cable’s dimensions, Petal uses glass fibres containing two light-guiding cores instead of one, with signals travelling in opposite directions. Its 24 pairs of dual-core fibres provide 96 cores, equivalent in capacity to 48 conventional fibre pairs. Around 100 repeaters are needed to strengthen signals over this distance. Within each repeater, a specialised interface separates the two cores’ signals into single-core fibres for independent amplification before recombining them. Together, low-loss fibre and efficient amplification enable the capacity increase without a proportional rise in power consumption, while remaining within existing 18-kilovolt equipment limits.
NEC is responsible for the system’s design and construction, including its cable, repeaters, power systems and installation. Sumitomo Electric supplies the multi-core fibre, while Orange manages the landing on France’s Atlantic coast and integration with Europe’s terrestrial network. Petal extends Meta’s previous subsea investments, including Marea in 2018, Amitie in 2023 and Anjana in 2025. Such infrastructure carries nearly 99 per cent of international data traffic, making undersea cables a fundamental part of global connectivity.
