While data centers frequently make headlines due to controversies over electricity bills, water usage, and zoning, Meta is quietly expanding its infrastructure in a less prominent area—the seabed. On September 21, Meta announced Project Petal, a 4,300-mile-long submarine cable connecting the United States and France. Expected to be operational in 2029, this cable will be the first transoceanic cable to provide petabit-level capacity. It will transmit 1 petabit per second, or approximately 125,000 gigabytes per second, twice the capacity of the most advanced transoceanic cables currently available. According to Meta, this is enough to allow three-quarters of the world's population to simultaneously stream music online.
Such projects rarely make headlines, but they are what enable AI products to run. Submarine cables are not new territory for Meta, which has been dedicated to submarine infrastructure development for the past decade, investing in more than 20 submarine cable projects. These projects span six continents, excluding Antarctica. The most ambitious project is Waterworth, announced in February 2025. The system will stretch over 31,000 miles, longer than the Earth's circumference. It will connect the United States, Brazil, South Africa, India, and other parts of five continents. Some sections will be laid approximately 4.3 miles below the water's surface to protect them from anchors and other hazards.
These projects are incredibly expensive. Meta has not yet disclosed the costs of Petal or Waterworth, but TechCrunch reported before the Waterworth project announcement that it could cost over $10 billion. Even so, the cables represent only a small fraction 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 plans to spend in 2025. With a budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars and a record scale of construction, Meta is betting that its infrastructure spending will pay off. How that will turn out remains to be seen.
