Tata Communications plans $450 million India fiber build

Tata Communications plans to spend $400 million to $450 million building about 10,000km of long-haul, AI-ready fiber across India, capacity aimed at the country's data centers and AI workloads.

The company will build in three phases, starting with the Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad-Chennai corridor, which Tata describes as one of India's most important AI and hyperscale growth routes.

Later phases extend into East Coast and western India data-center ecosystems, including Vizag, Bhubaneswar, Jamnagar and Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, or GIFT City.

For investors underwriting Indian data-center equity and debt, a campus's return depends on the fiber path and subsea landing that move its traffic out. Tata says the routes will connect data centers to international cable landing stations, letting Indian capacity reach overseas AI hubs across its network.

"A growing proportion of our expansion is being driven by anchor customer commitments and contracted demand," said Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, managing director and chief executive of Tata Communications.

Tata did not say how much of the 10,000km is contracted.

The Indian route plugs into a global backbone that Tata lists at 500,000km of subsea and 200,000km of terrestrial fiber, extending an existing international network domestically.

The fiber commitment lands a week after Tata Power set out plans for 2.8GW of Indian data-center capacity, as Private Infrastructure Daily previously reported.