Meta has announced Petal, a new subsea cable linking France and the United States with a designed capacity of 1 petabit per second (1,000 Tbps). The 7,000 km cable will use 48 fiber pairs arranged as 24 two-core pairs, doubling the bandwidth of Meta's earlier Anjana system, which runs from Spain to the US at 480 Tbps over 24 fiber pairs.
Building a two-core fiber cable at this scale introduces technical hurdles. Meta says it had to minimize crosstalk between cores and keep signal attenuation low over the full length. The solution involves ultra-pure synthetic silica in the preform and careful control of refractive indexes, with optical signals sent in opposite directions to reduce interference.
To maintain signal quality, Petal will use roughly 100 repeaters, each with single-body 96-amp amplification. The repeaters convert two-core fiber into single-core fiber via a Fan-In/Fan-Out interface before amplifying and converting back. Meta says this preserves the reliability of conventional single-core amplification while supporting the higher fiber count.
Petal is scheduled to enter service in 2029, with NEC, Sumitomo Electric Industries, and Orange (for the French landing) as partners. Meta frames the project as a way to add capacity and resilience for growing demand in Europe, though the company notes that even at 1 Pbps, the cable's theoretical ability to serve 75% of the planet with music streaming assumes a modest 160 kbps bitrate.