Tata Communications has announced plans to invest nearly 450 million dollars to build around 10,000 kilometres of long haul, AI ready fiber in India. The company said it has set aside 400 to 450 million dollars for the build, which it aims to make one of India’s largest AI ready connectivity networks, supporting demand from hyperscale and neocloud providers, AI workloads, digital native businesses, global capability centres, enterprises and emerging cloud platforms.
The build runs in three phases. The first covers the Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai corridor, one of India’s most important AI and hyperscale growth routes. Later phases expand into emerging east coast and western India data centre ecosystems, including Vizag, Bhubaneswar, Jamnagar and Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, and link those clusters to international cable landing stations.
Managing Director and Chief Executive Ganesh Lakshminarayanan said a growing proportion of the expansion is driven by anchor customer commitments and contracted demand. The planned system connects to Tata Communications’ existing global backbone, which the company puts at 500,000 kilometres of subsea optical fiber and 200,000 kilometres of terrestrial fiber.
The announcement is the connectivity counterpart to the data centre construction running across the same corridors: capacity announcements in India have concentrated on buildings and power, while this investment prices the fiber layer between them at roughly 45,000 dollars a kilometre.