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Tata Communications to spend up to $450 Mn on a 10,000 km fibre 'AI super highway' linking India's data centres
The Rs 4,350 Cr plan, funded from operating cash flows, aims to add about 6 Pbps of capacity between FY30 and FY36, starting with the Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai corridor.
Tata Communications said on October 26 that it plans to invest $400 million to $450 million in what it calls an AI super highway: roughly 10,000 km of new long-haul fibre built to carry traffic between India's main data centre and AI hubs. In its stock exchange filing the company put the capital expenditure at Rs 4,350 crore, to be funded from operating cash flows, figures CNBC TV18 also reported.
The network is meant to add about 6 petabits per second (Pbps) of capacity between FY30 and FY36, CNBC TV18 reported. For scale, the company's existing network capacity is 1.25 Pbps, and it is running at around 70% to 80% utilisation. Rupesh Chokshi, chief product and technology officer and global head of network services, told BusinessLine that the build will play out over a three to five year horizon.
The first phase covers the Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai corridor, which the company describes as one of India's most important AI and hyperscale growth routes. Later phases extend to Visakhapatnam and Bhubaneswar on the east coast and to Jamnagar and GIFT City in Gujarat, with data centre clusters tied into international cable landing stations. The new fibre will plug into Tata Communications' existing footprint of more than 500,000 km of subsea and over 200,000 km of terrestrial fibre, according to BusinessLine.
The commercial model is leasing, not captive use. Chokshi told BusinessLine the network is being built as a multi-tenant, commercial-grade asset to be rented out on long-term contracts to hyperscalers, neo-cloud providers, AI labs and enterprises, offering direct data centre to data centre links, custom service levels and diverse routing. He cited a 25-year asset life as part of the case for owning the fibre outright.
Managing director and CEO Ganesh Lakshminarayanan said in the company's release that India's data centre to data centre connectivity market could grow past $1 billion over the medium term, and that a growing share of the expansion is backed by anchor customer commitments and contracted demand. Tata Communications shares closed 1.56% higher at Rs 1,680.2 on the day of the announcement, CNBC TV18 reported, leaving the stock down 7.6% for 2026 so far.
