Tata Communications announces subsea cable investments between India and Singapore

MUMBAI: The cables beneath the ocean floor are about to get a lot busier. Tata Communications has announced strategic investments in subsea cable infrastructure between India and Singapore, snapping up significant fibre capacity to bulk up connectivity between the two countries’ emerging AI hubs, though the company kept characteristically quiet on the exact sum involved.

The investment lands on two fronts. Tata Communications is beefing up its Tata Global Network capabilities by integrating a new subsea cable system running between Mumbai and Singapore, while simultaneously buying into a consortium building a fresh cable connecting Chennai to Singapore, expected to be ready for service by the fourth quarter of 2029. The company is betting the India-Singapore route will become one of the world’s most critical digital corridors, a high-capacity, low-latency pathway underpinning enterprise, cloud and hyperscaler traffic across India, Southeast Asia and beyond.

The cable systems will plug into Tata Communications’ India terrestrial fibre network, offering onward connectivity to more than 100 data centres nationwide. It is no small infrastructure to lean on: the company’s Network Fabric already operates the largest wholly-owned subsea fibre network on the planet, spanning more than 500,000km of subsea optical fibre and over 200,000km of terrestrial cable, having integrated the TGN IA2 submarine cable as recently as 2025 to sharpen latency and network diversity.

The timing is no accident. India’s data centre market is projected to hit $13.11bn (Rs 108,813 crore) by 2034, growing at a compound annual rate of just over 10 per cent between 2026 and 2034, according to IBEF, with subsea cables increasingly acting as the lifeline connecting continents and their data centre clusters. Tata is not alone in racing to lay pipe: Google announced its own America-India Connect project in February, building a new subsea gateway in Visakhapatnam alongside three subsea paths and four fibre routes, part of a five-year $15bn AI infrastructure push.

As enterprises across Asia load up on AI-driven bandwidth demands, the subsea cable becomes the unglamorous hero of the data economy, the unsexy plumbing on which the entire AI boom quietly depends. Tata Communications has just made sure it owns more of the pipes.