Submarine cable resilience
Submarine cables form the backbone of global communications, carrying approximately 99% of the world's Internet traffic & enabling critical services such as financial transactions, cloud computing & government communications.
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As of 2024, more than 500 active & planned telecommunication submarine cable systems are estimated to span the globe, connecting continents, markets & households.
It is estimated that nearly 200,000 km of new submarine cables were installed in 2024, & this growth is likely to persist over the next few years.
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This infrastructure is indispensable for real-time apps such as financial trading, video conferencing & live streaming.
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Petal Transoceanic Subsea Cable
Funded & operated by Meta
Expected to enter service in 2029, the first transoceanic subsea cable @ petabit capacity, & the first to deploy multi-core fiber @ scale. Spanning 7,000 km between France & the United States, Petal will deliver 1 Pbps (1 petabit per second or 1,000 terabits per second), doubling what today’s most advanced subsea cables carry @ this distance w/out a proportional increase in power or physical infrastructure.
That’s roughly the network capacity required for 75% of the world’s population to stream music at the same time.*
*Calculation based on a total capacity of 1 Pbps w/ an audio stream bitrate of ~0.16 Mbps (160 kbps) for ≈ 6.25 billion simultaneous streams.
Petal will incorporate something called "fan-in/fan-out" tech. As each two-core fiber strand enters a repeater, an optical interface routes the signal from each core into a separate single-core fiber strand so that each can be amplified independently. The amplified signals are then routed back into the two cores of the dual-core fiber before continuing along the cable.
engineering.fb.com/2026/09/2…
Petal is one of many subsea cable investments by Meta in recent years, including Marea in 2018, Amitie in 2023 & Anjana in 2025. Marea, the company's first transatlantic fiber instalment, supports 192 Tbps, meaning Petal will offer more than 5X that capacity.
livescience.com/technology/c…
Meta’s Global Subsea Cable Infrastructure
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Firmus & Meta announce strategic AI infrastructure agreements across Asia-Pacific
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Firmus Technologies today announced a strategic compute partnership w/ NVIDIA running through 2034, anchored by a dedicated 360 MW NVIDIA DSX AI Factory campus in Batam, Indonesia.
Through the partnership, Firmus will sell NVIDIA-powered cloud services, with NVIDIA earning both standard product revenue and a share of the cloud revenue on the supported capacity. This structure accelerates adoption of NVIDIA platforms among the high-growth, high-conviction AI Native sector, and provides NVIDIA with a recurring, usage-linked earnings stream.
The agreement covers up to 170,000 NVIDIA AI accelerators across Grace-Blackwell, Vera-Rubin, and Vera platforms through 2027 and 2028, positioning the Batam campus among the largest AI infrastructure developments in Asia-Pacific. It marks substantial growth in Firmus' deployed AI Factory capacity in the region.
DSX gives Firmus the playbook to design, simulate, and operate the campus as a single AI factory, aligning HyperCube's efficient infrastructure through a common architecture. This brings capacity online faster, improves tokens per watt, and strengthens resiliency at scale, lowering cost per token for the AI-native, enterprise, and ISV customers served by the campus.
firmus.co/newsroom/firmus-to…
Meta & OpenAI Anchor Firmus’s APAC AI Infrastructure, Powered by a $300M Subsea Pipeline on SUBCO’s APX East
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Meta’s subsea cable investments expected to contribute over half a trillion dollars to Asia-Pacific and European economies by 2025
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