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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.

Reporting by Meta Engineering 1 min brief
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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 know

  1. Petal: first petabit-class transoceanic subsea cable

  2. Route: France–US, ~7,000 km (4,300 mi)

  3. Deployment date: 2029

  4. Technology: multi-core fiber at scale (capacity doubling)

  5. Operator: Meta

  6. 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…
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