While data centers draw attention amid mounting local opposition over electricity bills, water use, and zoning fights, Meta has quietly expanded infrastructure on a far less visible frontier: the seafloor.
On Sept. 21, Meta announced Petal, a roughly 4,300-mile subsea cable linking the U.S. and France. Expected to enter service in 2029, the company says Petal will be the first cable to deliver petabit-scale capacity across an ocean. It is designed to carry 1 petabit per second — about 125,000 gigabytes per second — roughly double the capacity of today’s most advanced transoceanic cables.
Meta says that capacity would allow about three-quarters of the world’s population to stream music simultaneously. Petal uses two-core fiber, which places two light paths inside each strand, enabling Meta to double capacity without a proportional increase in power or physical infrastructure.
These undersea projects receive less public attention than AI models and apps, yet they are essential to running those products. Meta’s personal AI agent, Muse, launched Sept. 8 and rose to No. 1 on Apple’s U.S. App Store within two weeks, overtaking ChatGPT. Muse, powered by Meta’s Muse Spark models, depends on moving massive volumes of data between Meta’s data centers and users worldwide — a need Petal and other cables are meant to serve.
Meta’s subsea footprint spans six continents
Subsea cables are not new for Meta, which has a market value around $1.85 trillion. Over the past decade the company has invested in more than 20 subsea cable projects that, taken together, touch every continent except Antarctica.
Its most ambitious effort is Project Waterworth, announced in February 2025. Meta says Waterworth will stretch more than 31,000 miles — longer than the Earth’s circumference — and link the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, India, and other regions across five continents. Some sections will be laid as deep as roughly 4.3 miles below the surface to reduce risks from ship anchors and other hazards.
Meta’s 2Africa system, whose core was completed last year, circles the African continent and connects to Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. Meta says 2Africa lands in 33 countries and can reach 3 billion people.
Meta has not pursued these builds entirely alone. Petal is being developed with Japan’s NEC and Sumitomo Electric Industries, and France’s Orange is handling the landing on France’s Atlantic coast. Meta has also partnered with rivals: the MAREA cable between Virginia and Spain, completed in 2017, is jointly owned with Microsoft and Telxius. Still, Meta is increasingly the lead owner; Waterworth will be wholly owned by Meta, making it only the company’s third solely owned cable, according to telecom research firm TeleGeography.
These projects are costly. Meta has not disclosed the price of Petal or Waterworth, but TechCrunch reported before Waterworth’s announcement that the project could top $10 billion. Even so, cables represent a small portion of Meta’s overall infrastructure spending. The company expects capital expenditures of $130 billion to $145 billion this year, nearly double the $72.2 billion it spent in 2025.
With 12-figure budgets and record-breaking construction plans, Meta is betting its infrastructure investments will pay off. Whether they do remains to be seen.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.
Source: fortune.com
