NEC to build Petal cable for Meta with 2× capacity

NEC and Meta Platforms are going ahead with a subsea cable called Petal, and NEC's Takahiro Kashima, director of its submarine business development department, framed the project as significant for NEC's future growth because it deploys the company's new technology in the main transatlantic corridor. If the cable performs as stated, it would be the highest-capacity link of its kind, at twice the capacity of the best existing cables and 125,000 gigabytes per second.

The article ties the project to the growing data transmission needs of artificial intelligence companies, a context in which moving large volumes of data quickly matters. NEC's role here is as builder rather than operator, and the unnamed beneficiary is Meta Platforms, which will have the cable built for it.

The stakes appear to hinge on execution: whether NEC's new technology can be deployed as planned in the main transatlantic corridor, and whether the 2029 operational date holds. For NEC, the project's value is tied to proving that technology in a central route, which Kashima connected to the company's future growth.