Meta to deploy petabit subsea cable between US and France

Meta has announced plans to deploy Petal, a subsea cable system designed to provide petabit-scale connectivity between the United States and France by 2029. Spanning over 4,300 miles (approximately 7,000 km), the cable aims to deliver a capacity of 1 petabit per second (Pbps), which would double the capacity of Meta’s previous record-setting Anjana cable.

The project utilizes advanced 2-core fiber technology to achieve this milestone. Unlike standard single-core fibers, this system uses two independent optical cores within each 125μm glass fiber cable to increase density. To overcome technical hurdles such as crosstalk—interference between the light signals in the cores—Meta is collaborating with NEC Corporation, Sumitomo Electric Industries, and Orange.

Beyond general internet traffic, the massive bandwidth is intended to serve as a physical backbone for Meta’s transatlantic AI clusters. The high capacity will facilitate the real-time synchronization of model training, data replication, and telemetry flows between North American and European data centers, addressing the intensive data demands of distributed GPU computing.