According to a 2024 Ericsson Mobility Report, global mobile network traffic, excluding fixed wireless access (FWA), will reach 303 exabytes per month by the end of 2030, roughly three times the 2024 level. Although not all mobile traffic crosses oceans, growth in cloud services, video, AI workloads, and international data exchange is increasing demand for transoceanic capacity.
Meta has announced Petal, a planned 7,000-kilometer subsea cable linking the U.S. and France with a designed capacity of 1 petabit per second, or 1 Pbps. Meta said the cable is expected to enter service in 2029 and deliver twice the capacity per fiber without a proportional increase in power use or physical infrastructure.
If Petal performs as designed, it could provide more capacity for cloud, AI, video, and other data-intensive services moving between North America and Europe.
Jean-Louis Le Roux, executive vice president of Orange International Networks, said in the announcement: “Reaching one petabit on a transatlantic link, 25 years after the terabit milestone, represents a significant breakthrough to meet the exponential traffic growth while optimizing network capacity. This makes us very proud to welcome this new generation petabit subsea cable.”
Meta’s leadership in subsea cable tech
In 2016, Meta moved from leasing capacity toward building cables. At this point, the company had begun treating subsea connectivity as an engineering platform rather than a problem of purchasing bandwidth.
By the end of 2020, the company said it had invested in several subsea cable projects, including Marea, Havfrue, Jupiter, and PLCN.
From 2021 onward, Meta became increasingly involved in spatial-division multiplexing, or SDM, which increases the number of independent channels within a cable. In its 2026 announcement, Meta said Petal advances this approach by placing two optical cores inside each fiber strand.
Meta compared Petal with Anjana, its approximately 0.5-Pbps transatlantic cable. Both systems use 24 fiber pairs, but Petal places two optical cores inside each fiber strand, allowing the planned system to reach roughly twice Anjana’s designed capacity without simply adding more fibers.
What this means for data centers
More subsea capacity could help telecommunications carriers, cloud platforms, content providers, and enterprises move larger volumes of data between North America and Europe.
The project also arrives as rising AI demand pushes operators to reconsider where computing infrastructure is built, including proposals for underwater data centers connected through subsea fiber.
Organizations in data-intensive industries such as finance, AI, and media may benefit as additional infrastructure becomes available. However, Petal’s capacity will not automatically produce faster connections or lower latency for every enterprise. Actual performance will depend on network routing, landing-station connections, carrier access, and the cloud regions involved.
For IT leaders, Petal is a long-term infrastructure development rather than an immediate reason to change cloud or networking plans. Its practical value will depend on which providers gain access, how traffic is routed, and whether the cable enters service as scheduled in 2029.