Meta, NEC, and Sumitomo Partner on Petal to Deploy Multi-Core Fiber at Transatlantic Scale

On September 21–22, 2026, Meta, NEC Corporation, and Sumitomo Electric Industries announced their collaboration to build 'Petal', a commercial petabit-per-second transoceanic submarine cable system spanning roughly 7,000 kilometers between the United States and France. Slated to enter service in 2029 with landing support from Orange, Petal incorporates Sumitomo Electric's 2-core ultra-low loss optical fiber (2C Z-PLUS ULL) across a 24 fiber-pair system (yielding 48 spatial channel pairs) and NEC-designed repeater hardware with reduced power consumption. Historically, scaling intercontinental backbone throughput required laying additional physical cables or packing denser standard fiber strands into subsea conduits. Both methods quickly encounter rigid thermodynamic, mechanical, and electrical constraints, particularly surrounding repeater power feeding over transoceanic distances. Petal shifts the scaling paradigm by commercializing multi-core fiber (MCF) at transoceanic distances. By routing two separate optical paths inside a single strand of fiber while utilizing advanced single-housing repeaters, the architecture achieves 1 Pbps capacity without linearly multiplying power or physical footprint. This project reflects a broader trend across hyperscale networking: the need to re-engineer core transport infrastructure for the agentic AI and massive distributed workload era. As foundation model providers distribute compute nodes, synchronization pipelines, and storage replication globally, wide-area network (WAN) interconnects have become the next major scalability bottleneck. Much like intra-datacenter optical switching and co-packaged optics have evolved to feed dense GPU clusters, inter-region and intercontinental backbones are moving toward spatial division multiplexing (SDM) and multi-core fiber to keep per-bit transport power sustainable. In practice, network architects and cloud infrastructure leads should view Petal as the starting line for commercial multi-core optical deployment across major cloud backbones. While the physical cable enters production in 2029, the design pattern signals that future WAN capacity planning will increasingly rely on advanced SDM topologies, requiring tighter automated telemetry, dynamic optical grooming, and software-defined traffic engineering to manage high-density multi-core pathways seamlessly.