Petal, a 1-petabit cable between France and the US due in 2029, is a cheap and clever piece of vertical integration. The same week, Meta let glasses wearers opt out of having what their cameras see stored to train its AI. Europe will push that setting to opt-in long before the cable carries traffic.
Meta made two announcements this week. On Monday it unveiled Petal, a 7,000km subsea cable between the United States and France that will carry 1 petabit per second when it enters service in 2029, double the capacity of the most advanced cables now crossing an ocean. In the same week as its Connect conference, the company confirmed a new setting that lets owners of its smart glasses stop Meta from storing what their cameras capture during Meta AI sessions to train its models.
Both concern the supply chain for Meta's AI. One input is transport: moving data between users and data centres on either side of the Atlantic. The other is the raw material: first-person images of the world, which no other large AI company collects at the same scale. Meta can engineer and pay for the first, and Petal shows how far ahead it is. The second depends on permission, which a California class action and European regulators will decide. The cable will arrive on schedule and cost Meta little. The glasses setting, on by default and off only for owners who act on a prompt, will become opt-in for European users well before 2029.
Where the extra capacity comes from
Petal's headline number rests on a modest piece of physics. The cable has 24 fibre pairs, the same count as Anjana, Meta's cable between Myrtle Beach and Santander, which carries roughly 500 terabits per second. Each Petal fibre has two light-carrying cores instead of one, so the 24 pairs become 48 spatial channels, each doing roughly the work of an Anjana pair. It is the first multi-core fibre used at transoceanic distance. About 100 repeaters were redesigned to amplify both cores at lower power, which lets the whole system run from a single feed point.
NEC is the system supplier, Sumitomo Electric makes the two-core fibre and Orange handles the landing on France's Atlantic coast. For NEC, putting the new fibre into "the main transatlantic corridor" is "a very significant project in terms of our future growth," Takahiro Kashima of its submarine business told reporters in Tokyo. A transoceanic system is limited less by glass than by the electricity that can be pushed down thousands of kilometres of conductor to drive repeaters on the seabed. Ship time, surveys, permits and landing stations are largely fixed per cable. Meta says Petal carries twice the data without a proportional increase in power or physical infrastructure. Doubling the bits on much the same fixed cost base comes close to halving the capital cost per bit.
The ownership history points the same way. Marea, which Meta and Microsoft opened with Telxius in 2018, carried about 200 terabits per second over eight pairs, and later consortium cables followed the same shared model. Anjana was Meta's alone, and Meta announced Petal alone too, naming suppliers and a landing partner rather than co-investors. In eight years it has gone from sharing cost with telecom partners to controlling the whole system, and with it the upgrade schedule and the spare fibre.
Timing is the main risk. The heaviest AI workloads, model training above all, stay inside one data-centre campus, a petabit link that opens in 2029 could miss the crunch it is meant to solve, and the date depends on permits and on making a new kind of fibre at scale. At Meta's scale that risk is cheap to carry. Meta has guided to $130 billion to $145 billion of capital spending this year. Even a cable costing several hundred million dollars would be a fraction of one quarter's spend, and it buys route diversity away from the Spanish landings that Marea and Anjana use. Petal is cheap insurance, and it puts Meta first in line for multi-core production.
The input Meta can't pay for
The glasses setting is a different kind of problem. When a wearer asks the glasses to read a menu or identify a plant, the camera sends an image to Meta, and until now Meta could keep those images for training. The new switch, "Store visual data from AI experiences", sits under Meta AI in the glasses settings of the Meta AI app. It is on unless the owner turns it off. Meta has started pushing a pop-up in the Meta AI app to point owners to it, warns that opting out may disable "visual reminders," and now says in its help pages that training on the images "may be automated or manual (human)." A prompt that comes with a feature penalty still leaves the default doing the work.
The setting follows reporting that made the data programme hard to defend. A Swedish newspaper found that annotators in Kenya reviewing material from the AI features could see images and video of intimate moments. A class action filed in California in March, amended on August 31 to add bystanders who never bought the glasses, accuses Meta of marketing the devices as "designed for privacy, controlled by you" while sending recordings abroad for annotation. It already polices the bystander signal on its own terms, having deactivated the hardware of thousands of users who tampered with the recording light.
That default is worth a lot. Meta and EssilorLuxottica sold more than 7 million units last year. Each pair that asks Meta AI about its surroundings supplies a labelled first-person image of the kind robotics and world-model research wants. Reality Labs lost $4.6 billion in the second quarter on revenue of $431 million, and training data is one of the few returns that division can show before glasses become a profitable device business. At Connect on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg added two styles with voice-only AI and no camera at all. Meta is already selling around the camera to buyers who do not want one.
Europe is where the default is weakest. The Irish Data Protection Commission is Meta's lead regulator under GDPR, and two Spanish Socialist MEPs, José Cepeda and Elena Sancho Murillo, have raised the glasses in a European Parliament question. European regulators made Meta pause training on public Facebook and Instagram posts in 2024. A prompted opt-out built for a US lawsuit is still not the opt-in consent European law expects, least of all for images of people who never agreed to be filmed.
What happens next
By mid-2027 Meta will have made visual-data training opt-in for EU users, either on its own or once the Irish regulator takes a position. The US default will stay as it is unless the California court forces a change. That would sharply cut the European share of Meta's first-person training data without stopping a programme that rests mainly on the US installed base.
Petal will land in 2029 as planned, the part Meta can control: capacity it can order from Japan on its own timetable. What its glasses are allowed to see will be settled by a court in California and a regulator in Dublin, and that input will matter more to the value of Meta's AI bet than the extra bandwidth.
Sources
- Meta: Announcing Petal
- Engineering at Meta: Inside Petal
- Submarine Networks: Petal system details
- Submarine Networks: Anjana
- TechRadar: Meta unfurls Petal, a 1,000,000 Gbps internet cable
- Japan Times: NEC building 1-petabit-capacity subsea cable for Meta
- Business Insider: Meta smart glasses have a new AI-training opt-out
- Engadget: Meta will stop training AI on glasses visual data if you opt out
- Engadget: How to stop Meta training its AI on your smart glasses' visual data
- Fortune: Glasses class action amended
- Meta Q2 2026 results
- European Parliament question P-000903/2026