Mumbai: India's AI boom is about to get a road built under it. Tata Communications will invest ₹4,350 crore, roughly $400-450 million, to lay around 10,000 km of new long-haul fibre across the country in what the company calls an AI super highway — a high-speed, low-latency network linking the data centre corridors where AI workloads sit.
The money comes from operating cash flows, not fresh borrowing. The company reported 9.6% year-on-year revenue growth to ₹6,688 crore for the September quarter, with net profit up 86% to ₹341 crore and free cash flows turning positive at ₹212 crore, which gives it room to fund the build from its own generation.
The work runs in three phases. The first covers the Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad-Chennai corridor, which the company describes as one of India's most important routes for AI and hyperscale growth. Later phases reach the emerging east coast and western India clusters, including Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar, Jamnagar and GIFT City. Those routes will link data centre clusters to international cable landing stations and to the company's global backbone, so a hyperscaler can connect an Indian site to an overseas AI hub without handing the traffic to someone else.
The capacity numbers are the company's own. It expects the build to add about 6 petabits per second between FY2030 and FY2036, on top of the 1.25 petabits per second it runs today at 70% to 80% utilisation.
CEO Ganesh Lakshminarayanan has said data centre to data centre connectivity in India could become a market of more than $1 billion over the medium term. That is a company estimate, not an independent forecast.
Several things remain undisclosed. Tata Communications has not published start and completion dates for each phase, route length per phase, the spending schedule, or anchor customers. The FY2030 to FY2036 window applies to capacity additions, not construction. Rights of way and other approvals are not detailed either.
The phasing is deliberate. Executives have said it lets the company match spending to demand, and that the project could begin contributing meaningfully around FY2028-29 as new fibre becomes operational. Asked whether the company would raise funds for the venture, an executive said it would if it eventually needed to.
The company already operates more than 500,000 km of subsea fibre and more than 200,000 km of terrestrial fibre.