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

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.