Lightstorm, Microsoft, Singtel and Tata Communications to Build AI-Focused India–Southeast Asia Submarine Cable

Hyderabad: Lightstorm, in partnership with Microsoft, Singtel and Tata Communications, has announced the launch of the India–Southeast Asia (I-2SEA) Submarine Cable System, a next-generation digital infrastructure project designed to meet the growing connectivity needs of Artificial Intelligence (AI), hyperscale cloud and enterprise workloads across India and Southeast Asia.

The consortium has officially signed contracts to begin construction of the new submarine cable, which will directly connect India, Malaysia and Singapore, creating a dedicated high-capacity digital corridor for AI infrastructure.

Purpose-built for AI-driven applications, the 3,600-kilometre submarine cable will connect India’s east coast with major AI and cloud infrastructure hubs in Hyderabad and Chennai, while linking them to Singapore, one of Asia’s leading cloud and AI hubs, and Kuala Lumpur, an emerging regional data centre destination.

The system will feature dual landing stations in India—one at Machilipatnam, providing the shortest subsea route to Hyderabad, and another at a new landing site in South Chennai. Through Lightstorm’s 30,000-kilometre terrestrial fibre network, customers will also gain seamless connectivity to Mumbai and more than 80 data centres across the country.

The cable system is targeted to become Ready for Service (RFS) in the fourth quarter of 2029. According to the consortium, when integrated with Lightstorm’s low-latency terrestrial backbone, I-2SEA is expected to deliver the fastest transmission speeds on the Singapore/Malaysia–Hyderabad corridor, a strategically important route for AI training and inference workloads.

“Lightstorm works around a single mission: interconnecting intelligence. As majority owner of I-2SEA and with SmartNet AI Fabric already delivering AI-ready transport across data centres and GPU clusters in India, we can now offer the natural extension of that platform into the subsea domain,” said Amajit Gupta, Group CEO and Managing Director, Lightstorm.

He added that the purpose-built network will connect AI regions across India, Malaysia and Singapore through a unified, high-performance infrastructure designed specifically for next-generation AI applications.

For Lightstorm customers, the submarine cable will integrate with the company’s SmartNet AI Fabric, enabling low-latency, loss-optimised connectivity across cloud platforms, GPU clusters and distributed AI infrastructure. The company will also operate the cable’s Indian landing stations and provide network management through its Polarin platform, offering real-time network visibility and on-demand provisioning.

The consortium said the cable system has been engineered for high resilience using optimised routing and a deep cable burial strategy of up to three metres along buried sections to enhance protection and maximise network uptime.

The project is being implemented under a Joint Build Agreement involving Lightstorm, Microsoft, Singtel and Tata Communications. NEC Corporation has been appointed as the system supplier, while ASEAN Cableship Pte Ltd (ACPL) will undertake marine installation.

With demand for AI computing, cloud services and hyperscale data centres rising rapidly across Asia, the I-2SEA project is expected to strengthen digital connectivity between some of the region’s fastest-growing AI ecosystems while supporting the next generation of AI infrastructure.