Meta Plans Petabit-Class Petal Cable

Elizabeth Rivera Hartling, Pascal Pecci and Matthew Mitchell, Engineering at Meta
September 21, 2026

Meta has announced Petal, a planned transatlantic submarine cable designed to deliver 1 petabit per second of capacity between France and the United States. The approximately 7,000 km system is expected to enter service in 2029. Meta describes Petal as the first transoceanic cable designed for petabit-class capacity and the first system intended to deploy multi-core fiber technology at scale, doubling the capacity available from each fiber without a proportional increase in power or supporting infrastructure.

Petal will use 24 fiber pairs built with two-core fiber, giving the system the optical equivalent of 48 conventional fiber pairs. Meta says that architecture will provide twice the capacity of its Anjana cable. The design also calls for single-body repeaters containing 96 amplifiers and Fan-In/Fan-Out interfaces that separate each two-core fiber into single-core paths for amplification before recombining them. Efficient pump sharing, low-loss fiber and controlled crosstalk are intended to keep the system within existing power-feeding equipment limits of up to 18 kilovolts.

NEC is the turnkey system supplier and is responsible for engineering, manufacturing and installing the cable, repeaters, Fan-In/Fan-Out equipment and power architecture. Sumitomo Electric Industries developed the two-core fiber, using ultra-pure synthetic silica and counter-propagating signals to limit attenuation and crosstalk. Orange and Meta are planning the French landing on the Atlantic coast and the terrestrial interconnection into European networks. Those supplier and landing roles move the project beyond a capacity concept and define the industrial partners responsible for delivery.

For the submarine cable sector, Petal is a test of whether multi-core fiber can move from limited experimentation into a repeatable commercial design for long transoceanic routes. Fitting twice the optical cores into the same fiber count could reduce the materials, power and infrastructure needed to reach one petabit compared with deploying two separate half-petabit systems. Successful delivery would establish a practical reference for other operators considering similar spatial-division designs. The current milestone is Meta's project announcement and supplier confirmation; the next stated milestone is completion of manufacturing, installation and landing work ahead of the planned 2029 service date.

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