Tata Plans 10,000 Kilometres of Fibre for India’s AI Hubs

About 10,000 kilometres of new fibre are central to Tata Communications’ plan to link India’s data-centre and AI hubs. The company announced on Monday that it expects to invest $400 million to $450 million in the network. It will also connect Indian hubs to international cable landing stations and its global network. The bet is on an often-overlooked part of AI infrastructure: links that carry data between computing sites. ^1,2

Those links will be built in phases. Tata Communications will start with the Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad-Chennai route, then extend the network to hubs including Vizag, Bhubaneswar, Jamnagar and GIFT City. The company says it is designing the system for large cloud providers, AI platforms and businesses. Chief executive Ganesh Lakshminarayanan said customer commitments and contracted demand are backing a growing share of the expansion. He also expects India’s market for links between data centres to exceed $1 billion over the medium term. ^1,5

That possible $1 billion market helps explain why the company is building connections between facilities, not just adding more computer space. Data centres hold servers that store and process information; fibre links let those sites exchange large amounts of data. As cloud use and AI services grow, banks and other businesses that depend on those systems need reliable connections. But the market estimate is a company forecast, not guaranteed revenue, and the full project rollout is planned over several years. ^2,3

The rollout is expected to add about 6 petabits per second of capacity between FY2030 and FY2036, on top of Tata Communications’ existing 1.25 petabits per second. The company says it will pay for the investment with money from its operations. The first phase is expected to become operational over the next three years, starting on the four-city route; later phases will extend the network east and west. ^9,10