$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.