ChipsThe story, in brief
Inside Petal: Building the World’s First Petabit-Class Transoceanic Subsea Cable
Meta's Petal cable hits petabit capacity across the Atlantic—the compute buildout just went undersea.
The KeyNews take
Why it matters
As AI training and inference scale globally, subsea infrastructure becomes a competitive moat. Petal's petabit-class capacity is a physical bet on where frontier compute will live in the next 3 years—and a signal that Meta is engineering for AI workloads at transoceanic scale.
The key facts
6 to knowPetal: first petabit-class transoceanic subsea cable
Route: France–US, ~7,000 km (4,300 mi)
Deployment date: 2029
Technology: multi-core fiber at scale (capacity doubling)
Operator: Meta
Strategic context: part of Meta's subsea infrastructure roadmap for distributed AI compute
Go to the source
Meta Engineeringengineering.fb.com
Publisher excerpt: Petal, the next step in Meta’s subsea innovation, will be the first subsea cable to deliver petabit capacity at transoceanic distances, connecting France and the United States over approximately 7,000 km (4,300 mi). Expected to enter service in 2029, it will be the first subsea cable system to…