The consortium, which also includes Tata Communications, Singapore Telecommunications, Singapore’s ASEAN Cableship and Japan’s NEC Corporation, will construct the 3,600km cable, named I-2SEA, to support AI, cloud and hyperscale workloads, the companies said on Thursday. No investment figure was disclosed.
The network will have landing stations in Machilipatnam, in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, a location where Meta and Alphabet have already announced data centres. Lightstorm Group chief executive and managing director Amajit Gupta told Reuters the cable is expected to be operational in the fourth quarter of 2029.
Lightstorm, backed by I Squared Capital, currently connects 19 AI and cloud zones across India via terrestrial fibre networks. Gupta said the new subsea link is expected to expand that to 29 zones. Separately, he confirmed Lightstorm plans to list in India in mid-2027, without disclosing further details; the company was reportedly seeking a valuation of up to $1.5 billion as of March.
India currently has 17 active submarine cables with a maximum potential capacity of 960 terabits per second, with at least 10 more publicly announced, according to TeleGeography. Undersea cables carry roughly 95% of the world’s internet traffic.
The move comes as India’s data centre capacity continues to scale rapidly. Macquarie Equity Research estimated last October that the country’s operational capacity, currently 1.4 gigawatts, could double by 2027 based on projects under construction, and increase five-fold by 2030 if planned developments are fast-tracked.
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