As a result of datacentre buildout in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, the former’s coastline will soon hold new landing stations for subsea cables, which connect the global internet to India. On one hand, Microsoft Corp is participating in a consortium with firms like Lightstorm and Singaporean telco Singtel to land the 3,600km India-Southeast Asia (I-2SEA) Submarine Cable System, and Google has the globe-spanning America-India Connect system, which will land in Visakhapatnam, where the tech giant’s datacentre complex is being built.
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“As part of this AI hub… we’re bringing in multiple new subsea cables that will land on the coast of Andhra Pradesh around the Vishakhapatnam area,” Alexander Smith, a Google executive who oversees several of the firm’s physical infrastructure projects in the Asia Pacific region, told The Hindu in an interview on Thursday (August 27, 2026).
“That will mean that essentially India will have, after Mumbai and Chennai, a third digital international subsea gateway… connecting India directly with Southeast Asia, so Singapore and a couple of the other main markets, down into Australia and right around into the Middle East and Europe and beyond. So this will… make India and Vizag in particular one of the most connected places in the world,” Mr. Smith added.
Lightstorm CEO Amajit Gupta said in an interview with The Hindu in June that I-2SEA “connects Southeast Asia, specifically Singapore and Malaysia, to the east coast of India,” and that the cable system, which also connects to Chennai, “provides a brand new corridor to South Asia” from Southeast Asia, where a lot of infrastructure serving Indian enterprises and consumers continues to reside. The cable system is set to be ready for service in Q4 2029.
Mr. Gupta said that new cable buildout in a fresh location was key to preserving Indian internet connectivity from a strategic standpoint. “If you peel the onion and look at the cables which connect the east coast of India… most of these are pretty old cables,” he said. “They are easily about 8, 10, 12, 15 years old… [they] are filled with capacity and are also rapidly running into end of life.”
Mr. Gupta said that there were geopolitical derisking tailwinds driving these investments. “I don’t need to tell you what’s happening in West Asia, which means people are beginning to think, hey, now this is getting so dangerous, why can’t we flush the traffic out to the eastern coast of India so that at the least I have resilience and at the best I have an alternate path [in case connectivity is lost].”
Terrestrial cable
On top of the subsea cable landing, both projects require significant infrastructure further inland. “This is a pan-India project,” Mr. Smith said. “We’re needing to install and then light and operate thousands of kilometres of new fiber … I think what’s kind of underappreciated is that this will really create a robust new layer of digital connectivity… that will go between some of the mainline metros.”
Taking a cue from landside fiber built on top of electrical transmission lines, Mr. Gupta said that Lightstorm is “likely to build a terrestrial corridor … which will connect Machilipatnam to Mumbai, Hyderabad and similarly Chennai to Hyderabad and Mumbai with the same bandwidth”. Lightstorm already operates a significant terrestrial fiber network, alongside Tata Communications Ltd and the three private telecom operators.
There have been real constraints on boosting terrestrial connectivity around the world. The rapid mushrooming of AI projects around the world has left fiber manufacturers with long backorders. “Fiber itself is out of stock across the globe,” Mr. Gupta said, “including from Indian manufacturers. And then the fiber sub-components, the fiber raw material, the inputs are all in short supply. So that has never been the case for the last 10 to 15 years.”
Google facility
Mr. Smith said that Google’s Visakhapatnam facility will focus on inference, with no immediate plans for performing power-hungry training runs. He added that the firm was trying to acquire as much renewable power for the project as possible — pointing out that Google is among the biggest buyers of renewable energy in the world — and that water use minimisation was also on the agenda with air cooling technologies.
He added that the Google facility will focus on inference for domestic enterprises and government agencies, as there has been “pretty deep AI adoption across the delivery of government services at the State levels as well as Union level.”
So far, Mr. Smith said on the consumer variant of Gemini, “it’s not always a case that services will be served from the closest data centre, which from here is probably Singapore and facilities that are online today in Taiwan.”
Published – August 27, 2026 09:47 pm IST
