ROME — Petal, touted as the longest and most powerful subsea fiber-optic cable designed to span 7,000 kilometers across the Atlantic Ocean, is projected to be completed by 2029.

The project is owned by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

The cable will link the United States and France, enabling a transmission rate of 1 million gigabits per second (1 petabit per second), equivalent to transferring 25,000 high-definition movies per second.

According to Meta, Petal will mark the first commercial subsea cable system to feature "multi-core" fiber technology—meaning individual fiber strands contain multiple independent cores for signal transmission.

While conventional optical fiber strands typically house a single core, each strand within Petal will integrate two distinct cores capable of carrying optical signals in opposing directions. This architectural advance effectively doubles the capacity within a single strand.

Each fiber strand maintains a standard thickness comparable to a human hair, measuring just 125 micrometers in diameter. Petal will contain 24 dual-core fiber pairs—totaling 96 cores—enabling it to carry a volume of data equivalent to what would otherwise require 48 conventional fiber pairs.

The subsea system is being developed and manufactured by Japanese technology firm NEC Corporation.

Once operational, Petal will become the first transoceanic cable system to reach petabit-scale capacity, delivering double the data throughput of existing subsea cables of similar length. This capacity is sufficient to allow 75% of the world's population to stream music simultaneously.

Subsea cables remain among the most critical components of global Internet infrastructure, serving as the backbone for worldwide data exchange. According to the International Telecommunication Union, underwater systems handle approximately 99% of global Internet traffic.