Meta Platforms (META) just announced Petal, an undersea transoceanic cable stretching about 4,300 miles between France and the United States. When it enters service in 2029, Petal will be the first transoceanic cable to carry a full petabit of data per second, double what today’s best cables manage at that distance.
This is a genuine engineering milestone. Meta has quietly become one of the world’s most aggressive builders of undersea cables, with more than 20 projects over the past decade. The news went largely unnoticed, mainly because of the excitement surrounding the company's recently launched artificial intelligence (AI) agent Muse, which has been touted as a game changer for the company's future.