NEC Corporation will build Petal, a 7,000-kilometer undersea cable connecting the United States and France. It is scheduled to become operational in 2029.
The cable will have a capacity of 1 petabit per second, twice the maximum capacity of the best existing cables. It will use NEC’s multi-core optical fiber technology, which places two cores in a single fiber to double data capacity.
Petal will be NEC’s third Atlantic cable project. NEC aims to grow its share of the subsea cable market from 25% to 35% by 2030, citing rising traffic from AI and data centers.
The Japan Times reported that NEC’s stock was little changed after the announcement.