Meta announced Petal, a new subsea cable planned to connect the United States and France over approximately 7,000 kilometers.
The project's technical target is a capacity of 1 petabit per second.
In other words:
1,000 terabits per second.
The cable is expected to enter service in 2029.
How Petal is intended to reach 1 petabit per second
Meta is planning Petal as a new transatlantic cable carrying enormous quantities of information between the United States and Europe.
The system will use 24 fiber pairs.
Instead of ordinary single-core fibers, Petal will use two-core fiber.
According to Meta, this yields capacity equivalent to a system with 48 ordinary fiber pairs.
Who is building the cable?
Meta named several key project partners.
NEC is responsible for system engineering, manufacturing and installation.
Sumitomo Electric Industries supplies the two-core fibers.
Orange will support the cable's French landing and connection to European terrestrial infrastructure.
Exact US and French landing locations were not published in the announcement.
How this relates to AI
This is not a new Meta AI product.
There is no new Llama model here.
There is no new Muse feature here.
Still, this infrastructure is relevant in a world of rapidly growing AI services.
AI systems require large amounts of information to move between:
- Data centers
- Geographic regions
- Storage systems
- Cloud services
- Users
- Inference systems
- Training systems
As companies such as Meta operate more AI services globally, the networking infrastructure beneath the cloud also needs to handle more traffic.
Meta says it will be the first of its kind
Meta describes Petal as the first subsea cable delivering petabit capacity over a transoceanic distance.
It also says it will provide approximately twice the capacity of today's most advanced cables operating over a similar distance.
These are Meta's claims.
At publication, no independent technical assessment verifying the comparison was found.
Meta also illustrates the capacity by saying it could let approximately 75% of the world's population listen to music simultaneously.
This too is a company illustration, not an independent metric.
Why Meta builds subsea cables
Large cloud and technology companies do not rely only on telecom providers.
Google, Meta and others have invested in global communications infrastructure for years.
The reason is simple:
Operating global services requires reliable capacity between data centers and different world regions.
Expanding AI services adds further demand for this infrastructure.
What should not be inferred from the project
Meta did not say all Petal capacity will serve AI.
The company also operates:
- Video
- Advertising
- Storage
- Internal systems
- Cloud services and other infrastructure
Petal is therefore general Meta network infrastructure. AI services are part of the broader system depending on such infrastructure, but Meta has not published a dedicated AI capacity allocation.
No direct connection to Israel
Petal is planned to connect the United States and France.
It is not planned to land in Israel.
Meta also did not publish information saying the project will directly improve Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Meta AI performance in Israel.
There is therefore currently no basis for assigning the project a direct impact on Israeli users.
The target: 2029
Petal is expected to enter service in 2029.
The project remains far from commercial operation.
The path requires:
- Manufacturing
- Marine deployment
- Landing
- Testing
- Connections
- Regulatory approvals
- Completion of terrestrial infrastructure
Meta has not published the project cost.
What remains unknown
It is unknown:
- How much Petal will cost
- How much capacity Meta will retain
- Whether some capacity will be sold or leased to others
- The exact landing point locations
- How capacity will be divided between AI, video, advertising and other services
- Whether the 2029 operating target will change during permitting and construction
The infrastructure beneath the cloud
When discussing AI, most attention goes to models and chips.
But behind cloud services is a physical network that must move information between data centers, regions and users.
If data centers are the AI world's factories, cables such as Petal are part of the roads connecting them.