The news
On September 21, 2026, Meta Platforms (META) announced the Petal subsea cable, designed to carry 1 petabit per second between the US and France. Meta said it would double the capacity of the most advanced transoceanic cables then in use and enter service in 2029.
Meta said the cable will run about 7,000 kilometers, more than 4,300 miles, and called Petal "the first subsea cable with petabit capacity to be deployed across an ocean." A petabit is 1,000 terabits. To show the scale, Meta likened it to the network capacity needed for three in four people worldwide to stream music at once.
Three partners are involved. According to a Meta engineering blog post, NEC (6701.T) is the turnkey system supplier and will manufacture and install the cable, and Sumitomo Electric Industries (5802.T) developed and makes its fiber. Orange (ORA.PA), the French telecom operator, is the landing party in France and will handle the connection into Europe's land-based network. Meta said it is working with Orange on plans to land the cable on France's Atlantic coast; it did not name the US landing site.
The capacity comes from multi-core fiber, in which one glass strand carries more than one light path. Meta's engineers wrote that Petal uses two-core fiber in a 24-fiber-pair system, equivalent to 48 fiber pairs. Each repeater, the amplifier units placed along the cable, splits the two cores into single-core fibers for amplification and then recombines them, within the limits of existing 18-kilovolt power feeding equipment.
According to Meta, the two-core design lets the cable move twice as much data while its power needs and physical hardware do not double along with it. Its engineering post said Petal will have double the capacity of Anjana, a 0.5-petabit transatlantic cable, and 5.5 times that of Marea, Meta's first transatlantic cable investment. Meta said it has invested in more than 20 subsea cable projects, including Project Waterworth.
The numbers
- Design capacity
- 1 petabit per second (1,000 terabits)
- Length
- About 7,000 km (4,300+ miles)
- Fiber configuration
- 24 two-core fiber pairs, equivalent to 48 pairs
- Capacity vs. Anjana, per Meta
- 2x (Anjana: 0.5 petabit)
- Capacity vs. Marea, per Meta
- 5.5x
- Expected in service
- 2029
Why CEOs should care
For CIOs and network leaders, Petal adds a new high-capacity route between the US and France, but not before 2029, and Meta has not said whether it will sell or swap any of that capacity. Enterprises that depend on transatlantic links should ask their carriers and cloud providers which cables their circuits use, how many independent routes protect them, and whether new systems like Petal will change prices or options once they are live.
For telecom operators and their boards, the partner roles are the story. Meta leads the project, NEC builds the system, Sumitomo Electric supplies the fiber, and Orange's role is landing the cable and connecting it inland. Submarine Networks, a trade publication, described Petal as a private Meta build. Carriers should decide where they earn money in that model: landing stations, backhaul and local access rather than ownership of the ocean route.
For CISOs and resilience planners, a direct US-France landing on the Atlantic coast adds route diversity for traffic between North America and continental Europe. Map which of your critical services cross the Atlantic, which landing sites and cables they use, and how quickly traffic fails over if one route is cut.
The bigger picture
Petal continues a series of Meta-backed transatlantic systems. According to Submarine Networks, Marea (2018) had a capacity of about 200 terabits per second with 8 fiber pairs, Amitié (2023) 320 terabits with 16 pairs and Anjana (2025) about 500 terabits with 24 pairs. Those gains came from adding fiber pairs; Petal instead puts two cores in each fiber, which Meta says avoids a proportional rise in power. The Marea figure is approximate: Submarine Networks, like Meta, puts Petal at 5.5 times Marea's capacity.
Meta's announcement tied the project to growing demand for digital services and did not mention AI or data centers. With more than 20 subsea cable projects by its own count, Meta is paying for and specifying the cables that carry its traffic, and Petal has NEC and Sumitomo Electric building a new fiber and repeater design to that specification.
What happened next
We found no further public updates on Petal, such as a named US landing site, between September 21 and September 29, 2026.
Watch for Meta or Orange to name landing sites and file for regulatory approvals, for NEC to begin manufacturing and marine surveys, and for any statement on whether other companies will buy capacity before the planned 2029 service date.
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