Looking to address the increasing demands of users in its home territory’s datacentre industry with what it calls an end-to-end connectivity fabric, supporting the performance, resilience and scale required for next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, Tata Communications has announced plans to make strategic investments of close to $450m to build an AI network infrastructure in India.
Explaining the needs for the investment, Tata Communications believes India is poised for significant growth in the near future, driven by accelerating cloud adoption, AI deployment, increasing data localisation requirements, and growing enterprise demand for resilient, high-capacity digital infrastructure. And as datacentre capacity expands rapidly across the country, connectivity was becoming as critical as compute power and energy availability in enabling the next generation of digital services.
That meant, the digital ecosystem enabler said, providing a high-speed, low-latency network fabric connecting India’s key AI datacentre corridors.
The investment aims to strengthen India’s emergence as a global AI and cloud connectivity gateway, intending to meet the unprecedented demand from hyperscale and neocloud providers, AI workloads, digital-native businesses, global capability centres (GCCs), enterprises and emerging cloud platforms. It will enable global hyperscalers, digital platforms and multinational enterprises to scale their operations in India with confidence as the country enters its next phase of digital transformation.
To fulfil its plans, it intends to build around 10,000km of long-haul fibre across India, creating one of the country’s largest AI-ready connectivity networks, integrated with Tata Communications’ global network backbone. This is claimed include one of the largest wholly owned and most advanced subsea fibre networks, spanning more than 500,000km of subsea optical fibre and over 200,000km of terrestrial fibre.
The first phase of the programme will focus on the Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad-Chennai corridor, one of India’s most important AI and hyperscale growth routes. Subsequent phases will expand connectivity into emerging East Coast and Western India datacentre ecosystems, including Vizag, Bhubaneswar, Jamnagar, Gift City and other strategic locations.
By linking the key AI corridors and datacentre clusters with international cable landing stations, Tata Communications assured that it could enable “seamless” connectivity between India and major global AI hubs across, positioning India as a strategic gateway in the global digital infrastructure landscape.
In parallel, Tata Communications said it would continue to support existing enterprise and datacentre connectivity requirements by scaling its current national long distance and metro network footprint, ensuring continued support for current growth while building capacity for the future demand it expects.
“We are excited about the opportunity in the India datacentre-to-datacentre connectivity, which we believe could evolve into a market exceeding $1bn over the medium term,” said Tata Communications managing director and CEO Ganesh Lakshminarayanan. “With our planned investments, we are building on our existing strengths to create one of the most comprehensive datacentre connectivity platforms in the market, positioning us to capture this significant growth opportunity.
“As we scale, a growing proportion of our expansion is being driven by anchor customer commitments and contracted demand, providing a strong foundation for sustainable growth, efficient capital deployment and long-term value creation.”
The move complements Tata Communications enhancing its Tata Global Network capabilities in June 2026 by planning a subsea cable system between Mumbai and Singapore, and then investing as a consortium member in a subsea cable system, connecting Chennai to Singapore with expected ready for service in Q4 2029.
In 2025, Tata Communications integrated the Tata Global Network – Intra-Asia 2 (TGN IA2) submarine cable to improve latency for faster performance, enhancing reliability through greater redundancy, and increasing network diversity through interconnection with TGN IA.
