Meta Petal subsea cable project

Meta has announced the development of Petal, a subsea cable system intended to connect the United States and France by 2029. The project aims to provide a transmission capacity of 1 petabit per second, which is approximately double the capacity of Meta’s previous record-setting Anjana cable. This capacity translates to a data transfer rate of roughly 125 terabytes per second, capable of transmitting 25,000 high-definition films (at 5 GB each) every second.

The system will utilize advanced multi-core fiber technology, specifically employing 24 pairs of dual-core fibers to provide 96 independent optical cores. As the first commercial deep-sea system to utilize multi-core optical fibers over oceanic distances, the design is intended to increase density and manage high-capacity data flows. To maintain signal strength across the 7,000-kilometer span, the project will use roughly 100 optical amplifiers utilizing specialized ‘fan-in/fan-out’ technology.

Technical partners for the project include NEC Corporation for design and construction, Sumitomo Electric Industries for fiber manufacturing, and Orange. The massive bandwidth is intended to serve as a physical backbone for Meta’s transatlantic AI clusters, facilitating 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.