Meta, NEC, and Sumitomo Build Petal Submarine Cable

Meta, in collaboration with NEC Corporation and Sumitomo Electric Industries, has announced plans to build "Petal," the world's first commercial petabit-class optical submarine cable system. Scheduled to enter service in 2029, the transatlantic cable will span approximately 7,000 kilometers between the United States and France. The infrastructure project aims to address the surging global demand for resilient, high-capacity connectivity driven by artificial intelligence and data-intensive communication traffic.

Unlike conventional single-core cables, Petal will deploy groundbreaking 2-core fiber technology developed by Sumitomo Electric, creating two independent optical transmission paths within a single glass strand. Configured as a 24-fiber-pair system, it will effectively deliver the capacity of a 48-pair cable, achieving a transoceanic transmission rate of 1 petabit per second (1,000 terabits per second). This doubles the capacity of existing best-in-class transatlantic cables—such as the Anjana system—without requiring a proportional increase in physical footprint or power consumption. Meta will fund and operate the cable, while NEC will serve as the turnkey system supplier responsible for overall engineering, manufacturing, and installation.

Additional Context
This section provides technological and market background not explicitly detailed in the original release.

The transition from single-core to multi-core spatial division multiplexing (SDM) represents a monumental leap in optical physics and subsea engineering. Historically, scaling submarine cable capacity meant either adding more physical fiber pairs—which thickens the cable and exponentially increases the electrical power required to pump the signal across the ocean floor—or expanding the optical transmission band. Petal circumvents these physical limits by embedding two distinct light-propagating cores into an industry-standard 125-micrometer glass fiber.

To achieve this without signal interference, Sumitomo Electric utilizes ultra-pure synthetic silica and counter-propagating signals (sending light in opposite directions through the two cores) to virtually eliminate optical crosstalk. Furthermore, NEC engineered a novel single-body repeater utilizing a Fan-In/Fan-Out (FIFO) interface. This allows the 2-core fiber to temporarily split into two standard single-core fibers at each amplification point, enabling the use of proven single-core amplification hardware before recombining the signal. By maximizing spectral efficiency while remaining within existing 18 kV power feeding equipment limits, the Petal project establishes a viable, scalable template for the next generation of global AI and cloud infrastructure.

Edited by an industrial journalist, Lekshman Ramdas, with AI assistance.

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