Tata Communications Plans $450M AI Super Highway Across India
3 min readTata Communications announced on October 29 that it will spend close to $450 million building what it calls an AI super highway for India: roughly 10,000 kilometers of new long-haul fiber linking the country’s main AI data center corridors. The company says the build will be one of India’s largest AI-ready connectivity networks.
Why India Needs an AI Super Highway
India’s data center capacity is growing quickly, with hyperscalers and domestic operators adding sites around Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune. Training and serving large models across several locations takes more than servers and power. It needs low-latency, high-capacity fiber between clusters, and that backbone has lagged the pace of data hall construction.
What Happened
Phase one of the network covers the Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai corridor, the cities that host most of India’s existing data center capacity. Later phases extend to the east coast and western India, including Vizag, Bhubaneswar, Jamnagar, GIFT City and other locations the company describes as strategic.
The new routes will also connect these clusters to international cable landing stations, so traffic can move onto Tata Communications’ global backbone. The company frames that as positioning India as a gateway to global AI hubs rather than a standalone market. Alongside the new long-haul build, Tata Communications will keep expanding its existing national long distance and metro networks.
Rupesh Chokshi, the company’s chief product and technology officer, said the AI economy needs more than compute and described the new AI Network Fabric as built for speed, scale and resilience, according to the announcement. Bloomberg first reported the plan on October 26, putting the investment at $400 million to $450 million.
Why It Matters
Most of the AI infrastructure headlines out of Asia this month have been about chips and data halls: SK Hyper’s $350 billion Korean data center plan, SoftBank’s $50 billion Malaysia push, and record quarters at TSMC and SK hynix. Fiber is the less glamorous layer that decides whether those sites can work together, and India has lacked a dedicated AI backbone tying its clusters to one another and to the world.
For Tata Communications, a carrier that already runs one of the world’s largest subsea cable networks, the bet is that AI traffic between Indian cities and out to global hubs will grow fast enough to justify a nationwide build. No completion dates were given, so the phase one timeline is the thing to watch.
India’s AI ambitions now have a plan for the roads between the cities, not just the buildings in them.