Meta is building one of the world’s biggest undersea cable networks - it’s just one piece of a growing seafloor empire spanning 6 continents
Article excerpt
While data centers dominate headlines amid mounting local opposition over electricity bills, water use, and zoning fights, Meta has been expanding its infrastructure somewhere far less visible: the bottom of the ocean. On Sept. 21, the company announced Petal, a roughly 4,300-mile subsea cable connecting the U.S. and France. Meta says the cable, expected to enter service in 2029, will be the first to deliver petabit-scale capacity across an ocean. It will carry 1 petabit per second, or about 125,000 gigabytes per second, double what today’s most advanced transoceanic cables can handle. According to Meta, that’s enough capacity for three-quarters of the world’s population to stream music at the same time. The company says Petal achieves this with two-core fiber, which fits two light paths inside each strand. That lets Meta double capacity without a proportional increase in power or physical infrastructure. Projects like this rarely make headlines in an industry fixated on AI models and apps, but they’re what make those products run. Meta’s personal AI agent, Muse, launched Sept. 8 and climbed to No. 1 on Apple’s U.S. App Store within two weeks, overtaking ChatGPT. It did so even as critics questioned how much access the agent needs to users’ email, calendars, and payment accounts. Muse is powered by Meta’s Muse Spark models, and products like it depend on moving enormous...
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The most ambitious is Project Waterworth, announced in February 2025.
