Tata Communications plans $450 million investment for India's 'AI Super Highway'

The project will be rolled out by Tata Communications in a phased manner. The first phase will be the Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad-Chennai corridor, a key AI and hyperscale growth route.

Tata Communications Ltd. announced that it will be building AI-ready connectivity infrastructure, which it calls India's "AI Super Highway", and has also planned an investment of $400 million to $450 million for the same.

In an interaction with CNBC-TV18 on Monday, October 26, the company's MD & CEO Ganesh Lakshminarayan said the "AI Super Highway" will include around 10,000 km of new long-haul fibre across India. It will be one of the country's largest AI-ready connectivity networks. The same will also be integrated with Tata Communications' global network backbone for end-to-end connectivity.

The project will be rolled out in a phased manner. The first phase will be the Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad-Chennai corridor, a key AI and hyperscale growth route.

Subsequent expansion will include the east cost and western India, including Vizag, Bhubaneswar, Jamnagar and GIFT City. The AI corridors and data centre clusters will be linked with the international cable landing stations.

The target customers for this include:

* Hyperscalers and neocloud providers

* AI workloads and digital-native businesses

* GCCs, enterprises and emerging cloud platforms.

Tata Communications MD and CEO Ganesh Lakshminarayanan said he sees the India data centre to data centre connectivity is a market that should exceed $1 billion in size over the medium term. He said growing part of its expansion is backed by anchor customer commitments.

The company's CPTO and global business head - network services, Rupesh Chokshi, said the AI economy needs more compute. It needs a network built for speed, scale and resilience, he added.

Shares of Tata Communications are trading 1.2% higher at ₹1,674.2 apiece. The stock has declined 7.6% in 2026, so far.