Meta has unveiled Petal, a roughly 7,000 km subsea cable that will link the US and France. It is designed to carry 1 petabit per second (Pbps), and Meta calls it the first transoceanic system to reach that mark.
The key is optical fiber with two cores instead of one, which Petal will stretch across an entire ocean. The cable will hold 24 pairs of these fibers. According to Meta, the design doubles peak capacity compared with today’s transatlantic systems, including Aurora, the cable it plans to lay between the US and Denmark. For comparison, Anjana, another Meta system with 24 fiber pairs, carries about 500 Tbps. Meta says power consumption and supporting infrastructure won’t double along with it.
Petal is the latest in a string of large cable projects from Meta. In February 2025, the company announced Waterworth, which it described as the world’s longest subsea cable.
Fitting two cores into one fiber created two engineering problems. Signal loss had to come down while the fiber kept its standard 125-micron outer diameter, and crosstalk between the cores had to be kept to a minimum. The fix relies on ultra-pure synthetic silica, among other techniques. Japan’s Sumitomo will make the fiber. Each core will carry traffic in one direction only, from France to the US or the other way, using the C and L bands.
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Meta also designed new amplifier repeaters for the cable. A 7,000 km route typically needs around 100 of these modules. Each Petal repeater houses 96 amplifiers. It pulls the signal from each core out of the fiber, boosts it separately and feeds it back in. The repeaters also work with existing 18 kV power systems.
NEC is the prime contractor, and Orange will handle the cable’s landing in France. Petal is scheduled to go live in 2029.
To put 1 Pbps in perspective, Meta says it would be enough for about three-quarters of the world’s population to stream music at the same time. The company also argues that a single 1 Pbps line uses fewer materials and leaves a smaller carbon footprint to build than two 500 Tbps lines.
