Mark Zuckerberg Is Quietly Building a 4,300-Mile Cable Under the Ocean – What? No satellites? Why’s that?
Sat 5:05 pm +00:00, 3 Oct 2026
Meta Platforms (META) just announced Petal, an undersea transoceanic cable stretching about 4,300 miles between France and the United States. When it enters service in 2029, Petal will be the first transoceanic cable to carry a full petabit of data per second, double what today’s best cables manage at that distance.
This is a genuine engineering milestone. Meta has quietly become one of the world’s most aggressive builders of undersea cables, with more than 20 projects over the past decade. The news went largely unnoticed, mainly because of the excitement surrounding the company’s recently launched artificial intelligence (AI) agent Muse, which has been touted as a game changer for the company’s future.
But why is Meta even building it? The answer is AI. Training and running AI models means moving huge amounts of data between continents. For years, tech companies rented space on cables built by telecom groups. That no longer works at the scale AI demands, so Meta, Alphabet (GOOGL), and Microsoft (MSFT) have shifted to owning the pipes outright. Petal is one piece of a far larger push alongside Project Waterworth, a more than 31,000-mile cable project spanning five continents. As I previously covered when Meta expanded its Hyperion data center past $50 billion, the company is trying to own every layer of the AI stack. The cables simply connect the data centers.
This ties into Meta’s spending debate as well. Meta’s capital expenditures are guided to be as high as $145 billion this year, and free cash flow has collapsed. For a company of this size, Petal alone won’t move META stock much. But it shows how Meta thinks. The company believes AI will be won on infrastructure, so it keeps spending, even though the payoff isn’t clear yet.
