Tata Communications is building a fiber network for India's AI hubs costing up to $450 million

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The 10,000 km long-haul network will link data center hubs, starting with the Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad-Chennai corridor

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Tata Communications, part of the Tata Group, announced plans on Monday to invest $400 million to $450 million in roughly 10,000 kilometers (about 6,200 miles) of newly laid, long-distance fiber spanning the country. The network will connect the country’s data center and AI hubs.

The first phase will cover the Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad-Chennai corridor. Later phases will extend to data center clusters on the east coast and in western India, including Vizag, Bhubaneswar, Jamnagar and GIFT City. The network will link those clusters with international cable landing stations and tie into Tata Communications' global network backbone.

The company is designing the network for global hyperscalers, AI platforms and enterprises.

Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, Tata Communications' managing director and CEO, said in a statement that the company believes data center-to-data center connectivity in India "could evolve into a market exceeding USD 1 billion over the medium term." He said a growing proportion of the expansion is being driven by anchor customer commitments and contracted demand.

Rupesh Chokshi, the company's chief product and technology officer, said in a statement: "The AI economy needs more than compute. It needs a network built for speed, scale and resilience." Chokshi said the company is putting in capacity designed to last 10 years, according to Bloomberg.

Amazon $AMZN.com, Microsoft $MSFT, Reliance Industries and Adani Group are among the firms committing roughly $300 billion to India's data centers and related facilities, according to Bloomberg.

Several of the corridor's cities already host major cloud investments. Microsoft in August announced general availability of its India South Central cloud region in Hyderabad, which joined its existing regions in Pune, Chennai and Mumbai.

Meta $META also agreed earlier this year to lease its first AI-enabled data center in India from Reliance, to be built in Jamnagar, a location in a later phase of the Tata Communications project.

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