Tata Communications is putting serious capital behind the network layer of India’s AI build-out. The company on Monday announced an investment of close to USD 450 million (around ₹4,350 crore) to build what it calls India’s “AI Super Highway” – roughly 10,000 km of new long-haul, low-latency fibre designed to stitch together the country’s fast-growing AI and data-centre corridors.

According to the company’s stock exchange filing, the network will add about 6 petabits per second (Pbps) of capacity between FY2030 and FY2036, on top of its current national capacity of 1.25 Pbps, which is already running at an estimated 70–80% utilisation. The capital expenditure will be funded through operating cash flows.

Three phases, starting with the Mumbai–Chennai AI corridor

The rollout will happen in three phases. The first will cover the Mumbai–Pune–Hyderabad–Chennai corridor, which the company identifies as one of India’s most important routes for AI and hyperscale data-centre growth. Later phases will extend into emerging East Coast and Western India clusters, including Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar, Jamnagar and GIFT City.

Crucially, the network will connect these data-centre clusters to international cable landing stations and integrate with Tata Communications’ global backbone, which spans more than 500,000 km of subsea fibre and over 200,000 km of terrestrial fibre. The aim is to position India as a gateway between domestic AI infrastructure and major global AI hubs.

Who it is built for

The target customers include global hyperscalers, AI platforms, neocloud providers, digital-native businesses, global capability centres (GCCs), banks and large enterprises – organisations whose AI training and inference workloads increasingly depend on moving massive volumes of data between facilities quickly and reliably.

“We are excited about the opportunity in the India data centre-to-data centre connectivity, which we believe could evolve into a market exceeding USD 1 billion over the medium term,” said Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, MD and CEO, Tata Communications. He added that a growing share of the expansion is being driven by anchor customer commitments and contracted demand.

Rupesh Chokshi, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Executive Vice President and Global Business Head – Network Services, underlined the logic behind the bet: the AI economy needs more than compute, and requires a network built for speed, scale and resilience.

Why it matters for CIOs

India’s AI infrastructure conversation has so far centred on GPUs, power and data-centre megawatts. Tata Communications’ move highlights the next bottleneck: interconnect. As enterprises distribute AI workloads across multiple data centres and clouds – and as global AI companies increasingly use Indian capacity to serve overseas users – low-latency, high-capacity links between sites become as strategic as the compute itself.

For CIOs planning multi-site AI architectures, disaster recovery for AI systems or hybrid cloud strategies, the growth of dedicated AI-ready fibre corridors could expand options for where workloads run and how quickly data can move between them. In parallel, Tata Communications said it will keep scaling its existing national long-distance and metro networks to support current enterprise and data-centre demand.

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