# Meta Is Laying a 4,300-Mile Cable Across the Atlantic Just to Keep Up With Its Own AI > Petal, Meta's new US-France subsea cable, will carry double the capacity of existing transoceanic lines. It's one piece of a seafloor buildout now stretching more than 20 projects, all aimed at moving the data Meta's AI products generate. - Source: Continental - Canonical URL: https://continental.today/article/meta-petal-undersea-cable-us-france - Author: staff - Section: Business - Published: 2026-10-03T21:36:41.374Z - Updated: 2026-10-03T21:36:41.374Z - Tags: Meta, Undersea Cables, AI Infrastructure --- Meta announced on September 21 a new transatlantic subsea cable called Petal, a 4,300-mile line connecting the United States and France, expected to enter service in 2029. It's designed to carry 1 petabit per second, roughly 125,000 gigabytes a second, double the capacity of existing transoceanic cables, and enough, by the company's own description, for three-quarters of the world's population to stream music at the same time. Petal gets that capacity boost from two-core fiber technology, which fits two separate light paths inside each strand of cable rather than one, doubling throughput without a proportional increase in power or physical infrastructure. Meta is building it with Japan's NEC and Sumitomo Electric Industries, while French telecom Orange will handle the cable's landing in France. The push for more undersea capacity traces directly back to AI. Moving the enormous volumes of data behind Meta's AI products between its data centers and users worldwide requires infrastructure that simply didn't exist a few years ago. The company's AI agent Muse, launched September 8, reached No. 1 on Apple's U.S. App Store within two weeks, a rollout that illustrates exactly the kind of global data load these cables are meant to support. Petal is one piece of a much larger buildout. Meta's most ambitious subsea undertaking, Project Waterworth, announced in February 2025, stretches more than 31,000 miles, longer than Earth's circumference, connecting the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, India, and other regions across five continents, with some segments laid as deep as 4.3 miles specifically to protect the cable from ship anchors. Meta's separate 2Africa system circles the African continent, lands in 33 countries, and reaches an estimated 3 billion people. In total, Meta has now invested in more than 20 subsea cable projects touching every continent except Antarctica. Meta has historically built these cables as joint ventures; its 2017 MAREA cable between Virginia and Spain is still jointly owned with Microsoft and the telecom company Telxius. More recently, the company has moved toward owning projects outright: Waterworth will be wholly Meta-owned, only the third cable the company has owned entirely on its own. Meta hasn't disclosed what Petal or Waterworth cost to build, though Waterworth alone has been reported by TechCrunch to exceed $10 billion. Even so, subsea cables remain a small slice of Meta's total infrastructure spending, which the company expects to reach $130 billion to $145 billion this year, nearly double the $72.2 billion it spent in 2025. --- Originally published by Continental. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://continental.today/article/meta-petal-undersea-cable-us-france.