India's 17 active subsea cables carry a maximum potential capacity of 960 terabits per second, and at least 10 more have been publicly announced—yet a new consortium is adding another link that won't light up for three and a half years.
Lightstorm, an I Squared-backed telecom startup, is leading a consortium that includes Microsoft, Tata Communications, Singapore Telecommunications, ASEAN Cableship, and NEC Corporation to build the I-2SEA cable. The 3,600 km route will connect Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh to Malaysia and Singapore, landing in a region where Meta and Alphabet have already announced data centers.
Why India Needs Another Subsea Cable
India's operational data center capacity could double from 1.4 gigawatts by 2027, and if planned projects are fast-tracked, it could increase five-fold by 2030, according to Macquarie Equity Research. Every one of those racks needs bandwidth, and undersea cables carry roughly 95% of the world's internet traffic. The I-2SEA cable is explicitly designed to support AI, cloud, and hyperscale workloads—the kind that chew through terabit-scale links.
Lightstorm CEO Amajit Gupta told Reuters the company currently connects 19 AI and cloud zones across India via terrestrial fiber, and the new network will expand that to 29 zones. That's a nearly 53% increase in reach, driven entirely by demand for GPU clusters and large-scale inference.
The Consortium and the Timeline
Don't hold your breath for next quarter. The cable is expected to be operational in the fourth quarter of 2029. That's a long lead time for a project that lacks even a disclosed investment figure. Still, the consortium's composition is telling: Microsoft gets a dedicated path into India's fastest-growing data market, and Lightstorm—which is targeting a valuation of up to $1.5 billion in its mid-2027 listing—gets an anchor tenant for its fiber network.
India currently has 17 submarine cables; the I-2SEA will be one of at least 11 more in the pipeline. NEC Corporation, the Japanese giant building the cable, has a track record of delivering on time. But 2029 is far enough out that technology could shift—think fatter fibers or new optical gear that makes this cable's initial capacity look quaint.
Data Center Boom Driving Demand
Macquarie's projection of a five-fold capacity increase by 2030 isn't just hype. Floorspace under construction today will come online within 18 months, and hyperscalers are already booking space. The I-2SEA cable's landing in Machilipatnam directly aligns with the data center corridor forming in Andhra Pradesh. If India's data center capacity hits 7 GW by the end of the decade, every bit of subsea capacity will be spoken for.
With 10 more cables announced and capacity projected to quintuple, the I-2SEA cable is just one piece of a massive infrastructure buildout that will determine how quickly AI services scale in the region.
Source: Microsoft partners with Singapore's Lightstorm to build India-Southeast Asia undersea cable
Domain: economictimes.indiatimes.com
Comments load interactively on the live page.