Submarine cable system project linking India, Malaysia, Singapore unveiled

A consortium comprising tech giant Microsoft, Singtel, Tata Communications and AI connectivity platform Lightstorm will build a submarine cable system connecting India, Malaysia and Singapore.

“The facility is designed to cater to the rapidly growing demand from hyperscalers, GPU infrastructure providers and enterprises running AI training and inference workloads across the India–Southeast Asia corridor,” Lightstorm said announcing signing of contracts to launch the build of the cable system on Thursday (July 2, 2026). No details of the proposed investment on the project were shared.

I-2SEA, the cable system, will link India’s east coast, home to the fastest-growing AI and hyperscaler data centre clusters in Hyderabad and Chennai, directly to Singapore, which is the region’s cloud interconnect and AI hub as well as Malaysia’s emerging data centre corridor in Kuala Lumpur. It will have dual landings in India, with the one at Machilipatnam providing shortest subsea access to Hyderabad and the other at a new diverse landing location in South Chennai.

“The I-2SEA consortium will operate under a joint build agreement. NEC Corporation has been appointed as system supplier and ASEAN Cableship (ACPL) as marine installation partner. The system is now open for capacity commitments,” Lightstorm said.

I-2SEA is targeted to be ready-for-service in Q4 2029 and the estimated length of the high-capacity cable is 3,600 km from Singapore to Machilipatnam with onward connectivity to Hyderabad. “It is expected to deliver the fastest transmission on the Singapore/Malaysia–Hyderabad corridor, which is the most strategically critical city pair for AI workloads in the region,” the company said.

Lightstorm said it will operate the cable system’s Indian landing stations and is equipped to provide unified network management through its SmartNet AI Fabric and Polarin platform. The system will feature an interoperable cable architecture and carrier-neutral landing infrastructure at both Indian landing points. “On our network, AI regions across India, Malaysia, and Singapore will be connected by a single, purpose-built end-to-end system engineered for the performance and scale that AI infrastructure requires,” Lightstorm Group CEO and MD Amajit Gupta said.