Meta Platforms $META just announced that it is building a new undersea cable to connect the United States and France Meta says the new cable "Petal" is the "the first transoceanic subsea cable at petabit capacity, and the first to deploy multi-core fiber at scale" "Petal will deliver 1 Pbps (1 petabit per second or 1,000 terabits per second), doubling what today’s most advanced subsea cables carry at this distance."

We’re announcing Petal, the next step in Meta’s subsea innovation and the first subsea cable to deliver petabit capacity across an ocean, doubling the capacity of today’s most advanced transoceanic cables.

$META UNVEILS FIRST PETABIT-SCALE TRANSATLANTIC CABLE BETWEEN U.S. AND FRANCE Meta announced Petal, a new roughly 7,000-km subsea cable designed to carry 1 petabit per second between the U.S. and France when it enters service in 2029. Meta says that is roughly 2x the capacity of today’s most advanced transoceanic cables and represents the largest single-generation capacity jump for a transoceanic system. Petal will use multi-core fiber technology across transoceanic distances, allowing more data to move through each fiber without a proportional increase in power or physical infrastructure. The system is being developed with NEC and Sumitomo Electric, while Orange will support the French landing. The project adds to Meta’s growing global network infrastructure as AI workloads drive sharply higher bandwidth requirements between data centers and regions.

China’s flying-wing airliner concept just dropped >>>> and it’s pure multipolar ambition in action.While Boeing and Airbus keep recycling the same old “tube with wings” designs from the last century, Chinese researchers at CARDC (the same institute behind C919 and Y-20) have unveiled a radical flying-wing passenger aircraft that could carry more than 800 people. Key details: • 85 metres wide, 43 metres long • Wingspan 1.6× the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber • Far bigger capacity than the A380’s typical 555 seats • Originally scaled from a 250-seat layout, now pushed into the ultra-large class as part of China’s long-term widebody push (alongside the C929 and C949) • Cruise speed Mach 0.8 • Wing area ~1,395 m² with high aspect ratio for exceptional lift-to-drag They’ve already tested a 1:52 stainless-steel scale model (1.6 m wingspan) in a full transonic wind tunnel. Results: max lift-to-drag ratio of ~20 below Mach 0.7 and still 17.6 at cruise — meaning longer range and significantly lower fuel burn.This isn’t science fiction. It’s China systematically building the next generation of civil aviation on its own terms — high-efficiency configurations the West abandoned or never scaled for passengers. The Empire talks sanctions and “decoupling.” China quietly redesigns the sky.

I bet long term, SpaceX is going to be the default choice for overseas cargo deliveries, especially when Starship is proven to work. “Once you achieve full reusability, then it’s simply the cost of access to orbit is just the cost of propellant, because now you can reuse all aspects of the vehicle. The propellant we use for the Starship is liquid oxygen and liquid methane, which is the cheapest propellant you could possibly get. …So the cost of propellant for Starship will be less than the cost of jet aviation fuel, which means that you should be able to actually send cargo to space for less than the cost of cargo of an airplane going on a transoceanic trip.”