Tata Communications AI fibre network plan: $450 million investment

Tata Communications will invest close to $450 million to build a high-speed, low-latency fibre network for artificial intelligence workloads across India. The Tata Communications AI fibre network, described by the company as India's AI super highway, will run for about 10,000 km and link the country's main data centre corridors. The company announced the plan on 26 October 2026.

The network will be built in three phases over three to five years and funded from operating cash flows, chief product and technology officer Rupesh Chokshi told The Economic Times. The first phase will cover the Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad-Chennai corridor, which the company calls one of India's most important routes for AI and large-scale data centre growth.

Tata Communications AI fibre network phases

Later phases of the Tata Communications AI fibre network will extend coverage to Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar, Jamnagar and GIFT City in Gujarat, among other places. The network will link data centre clusters to subsea cable landing stations, so traffic from Indian data centres can reach global AI hubs through Tata Communications' existing backbone.

Tata Communications already operates more than 500,000 km of subsea fibre and more than 200,000 km of terrestrial fibre, according to The Hindu BusinessLine. The new network will sit alongside that backbone and offer direct links between data centres, with custom service levels, very low latency and diverse routing for hyperscalers, neo-cloud providers and large firms.

Tata Communications AI fibre network demand

Managing director and chief executive Ganesh Lakshminarayanan said demand for links between data centres in India could grow into a market worth more than $1 billion over the medium term. He said: "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."

Lakshminarayanan added that a growing share of expansion is driven by anchor customer commitments and contracted demand. The Tata Communications AI fibre network is aimed at workloads from generative AI and agentic AI systems, which need higher capacity and steadier latency than older telecom networks were built to carry. The company said the network is engineered for those workloads rather than adapted from general telecom capacity.

Tata Communications AI fibre network finances

Tata Communications reported September quarter revenue growth of 9.6% to Rs 6,688 crore and a net profit rise of 86% to Rs 341 crore, according to TradingView News. Free cash flow turned positive at Rs 212 crore in the quarter. Chokshi said the phasing of the Tata Communications AI fibre network should let the company manage funding from operations, and the company has not said it will raise fresh funds for the project.

The investment figure has been reported as $400 million to $450 million, or about Rs 4,350 crore, in different reports on the announcement. Tata Communications put the figure at close to $450 million in its statement. Work on the first corridor will come first, with east coast and western India coverage following in later phases of the Tata Communications AI fibre network.

The AI super highway name covers the whole programme, and the company said the AI super highway will be integrated with its global backbone. Funding from operating cash flows is the stated plan, and operating cash flows in the September quarter turned positive at Rs 212 crore. The existing subsea fibre network spans more than 500,000 km, and that subsea fibre base is part of why the company says it can link Indian hubs to landing stations without building a separate international network from scratch.