Tata Communications plans ₹4,350 crore investment in AI connectivity network

The proposed network, dubbed the “AI Super Highway”, will span approximately 10,000 km and connect key data centre clusters and technology hubs.Tata Communications plans to invest up to $450 million (around ₹4,350 crore) over the next three to five years to develop an artificial intelligence (AI)-ready connectivity network across India, as demand for high-speed data transmission rises alongside investments in AI computing and data centres, the company said in a statement.The proposed network, dubbed the “AI Super Highway”, will span approximately 10,000 km and connect key data centre clusters and technology hubs.The investment aims to enable faster, more reliable, low-latency communication between computing facilities, which is becoming increasingly important as AI workloads expand.The project will be rolled out in phases, beginning with the Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad-Chennai corridor.

Subsequent phases will extend connectivity to the eastern coast and western India, including Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar, Jamnagar and Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City).The network will primarily comprise long-distance and metropolitan fibre infrastructure, with international submarine cable systems complementing domestic connectivity.It will connect data centres with cloud service providers, global capability centres, financial institutions, and other enterprises that require large volumes of data to be moved between locations.The investment comes as AI model training, inference and cloud computing increase the demand for high-capacity networks.Data centres increasingly need to exchange large datasets and computing workloads, making network speed, reliability and latency critical to AI infrastructure performance.Tata Communications is positioning the proposed network to serve hyperscalers, emerging cloud providers, AI companies and enterprise technology customers.

Its existing domestic and international fibre infrastructure is expected to support the expansion.By expanding its AI-focused network, Tata Communications aims to strengthen its position in the data centre connectivity market and tap into the infrastructure needs emerging from India's growing AI ecosystem.