New Delhi: Tata Communications will build what it calls India's AI super highway — about 10,000 km of new long-haul fibre connecting the country's main AI and data-centre corridors — at a cost of close to $450 million, the company said on Thursday.
The network is designed for high speed and low latency, and will be plugged into Tata Communications' global backbone. The first phase focuses on the Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad-Chennai corridor, one of the busiest routes for hyperscale capacity in the country. Later phases will reach the emerging east-coast and western India clusters, including Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar, Jamnagar and GIFT City. Linking those corridors to international cable landing stations is meant to position India as a gateway between global AI hubs and domestic capacity.
"As data centre capacity expands rapidly across the country, connectivity is becoming as critical as compute power and energy availability in enabling the next generation of digital services," the company said.
The stated target customers are hyperscale and neocloud providers, AI workloads, digital-native businesses, global capability centres and emerging cloud platforms.
The announcement comes amid a policy push on the same themes. At the Emerging Science, Technology and Innovation Conclave 2026 in New Delhi, the Department of Telecommunications set out priorities spanning AI-native 6G networks, quantum-safe communications and zero-trust security. Telecom Secretary Amit Agrawal said India has about 1.2 billion mobile connections and 5G coverage in almost every district, and that the Telecommunications Technology Development Fund has backed more than 130 projects worth roughly ₹500 crore.
The demand side is shifting. Ericsson ConsumerLab research projects daily multimodal AI use in India rising from 22% now to 43% by 2030, against a global forecast of 30%. Because users send images, video and audio to cloud models, mobile traffic becomes more uplink-intensive — the opposite of what 4G and 5G networks were built to carry, since phones transmit at far lower power than base stations.
The money side is harder. TRAI data for FY26 shows wireless data usage grew 24.74% while data revenue rose 11.53%, and average realisation per gigabyte fell 10.59% from ₹8.97 to ₹8.02.
"In India's price-sensitive market, operators will struggle to pass on network investments through higher data tariffs alone," said Siddhant Cally, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, arguing that premium connectivity, enterprise services and partnerships with AI and cloud players will matter more.
Tata Communications did not give a completion date for the programme.