Meta is building one of the world's biggest undersea cable networks, and its latest piece is a cable called Petal. The company announced Petal as a roughly 4,300-mile subsea cable connecting the United States and France. It is just one part of a growing seafloor empire that spans six continents.
While data centers get most of the attention these days, Meta has been quietly expanding its infrastructure somewhere far less visible: the bottom of the ocean.
What Is the Petal Undersea Cable?
Petal is a subsea cable that will run under the ocean between the US and France. Meta says it is expected to enter service in 2029. When it does, the company says it will be the first cable to deliver petabit-scale capacity across an ocean.
The cable will carry 1 petabit per second, or about 125,000 gigabytes per second. According to Meta, that is double what today's most advanced transoceanic cables can handle. The company says this is enough capacity for three-quarters of the world's population to stream music at the same time.
Meta says Petal achieves this with two-core fiber. This is the technical detail behind the cable's record capacity.
Why Meta Is Building a Seafloor Network
Data centers have been dominating headlines, with local opposition growing over electricity bills, water use, and zoning fights. Meta's undersea cable push is happening far from that spotlight.
The Petal cable is not a standalone project. It is one piece of a growing seafloor empire spanning six continents. This means Meta is not just building one cable — it is building a network that reaches across the globe.
Undersea cables carry the vast majority of international internet traffic. By building its own cables, Meta gains more control over the physical infrastructure that connects its services worldwide.
Our Take: Why This Matters
To put it plainly, Meta is making a long-term bet on the physical backbone of the internet. While everyone argues about data centers on land, Meta is laying cable on the ocean floor.
In our view, this is a smart move for the company. Data centers face growing pushback from local communities over power and water. Undersea cables face far less public resistance because they are out of sight. Meta gets to expand its infrastructure without the same level of scrutiny.
The Petal cable's capacity is the real story here. At 1 petabit per second, it doubles what the best current cables can do. That kind of bandwidth matters as more people stream, game, and use AI-powered services that need huge amounts of data moving across oceans.
But there is a bigger question readers should think about. When one company builds a large share of the world's undersea cable network, it gains significant control over global internet infrastructure. That is a lot of power in the hands of a single private company.
For now, Meta's seafloor empire keeps growing. The Petal cable is expected in 2029, and it likely will not be the last.
