The emerging artificial intelligence (AI) hubs of Mumbai and Chennai in India and Singapore are said to be among Asia’s leading cloud and AI ecosystems, and to tap into this highly dynamic market and strengthen its connectivity offerings, global communications technology player Tata Communications has made strategic investments in subsea cable infrastructure in the region via its acquisition of “significant” fibre capacity.
The company believes the India-Singapore subsea route is set to become one of the world’s most critical digital corridors in future, representing a high-capacity, low-latency pathway that will underpin critical enterprise, cloud and hyperscaler traffic between India, Southeast Asia and global markets.
Through these investments Tata Communications says it’s enhancing the Tata Global Network (TGN) as part of a general aim of addressing the growing bandwidth and AI-driven data demands of enterprises across Asia and further extension globally.
By enhancing capacity on its TGN network, Tata Communications says it’s furthering its ability to deliver diverse, agile and high-performance connectivity to customers.
Specifically, the company will be integrating a subsea cable system between Mumbai and Singapore; investing as a consortium member in a new subsea cable system, connecting Chennai to Singapore with expected ready for service (RFS) in the fourth quarter of 2029.
Together, these investments are seen as being able to meet the growing needs of the datacentre ecosystem offering enterprises a scalable, reliable and future-ready connectivity between India and Singapore.
The cable systems will further connect with Tata Communications India Terrestrial fibre network for onward connectivity to other parts of the country and to more than 100 datacentres nationwide.
Combined with the global TGN Subsea network, the overall network is seen as enhancing the capabilities of the full suite of IZO connectivity offerings such as IZO DC Dynamic Connectivity and IZO multi-cloud providing self-healing, always-on and self-provisioning capabilities across datacentres and cloud ecosystems. Tata notes that customers will be able to activate and integrate these capacities with agility into their networks on demand.
“As global demand for digital and AI-driven services continues to accelerate, these investments reinforce our commitment to building future-ready digital infrastructure at scale,” said Genius Wong, Tata Communications’ departing executive vice-president of core and next-gen connectivity services and chief technology officer.
“By combining subsea capacity enhancement with both short-term and long-term strategic investments, we are strengthening the reliability, scalability and performance of connectivity solutions for our customers across one of the world’s busiest digital corridors,” she said. “These enhancements align with Tata Communications’ long-term strategy to expand its global subsea network footprint, provide business outcome solutions to customers and reinforce India’s position as a Digital Hub.”
The backbone of the portfolio is the Tata Communications Network Fabric subsea fibre network, which comprises more than 500,000km of subsea optical fibre and in excess of 200,000km of terrestrial fibre. To enhance further enterprise connectivity across Asia and beyond, in 2025, Tata Communications has integrated the new Tata Global Network – Intra-Asia 2 (TGN IA2) submarine cable.
The latter is said to improve latency for faster performance, enhancing reliability through greater redundancy and increasing network diversity through interconnection with TGN IA.
