Singapore-based Lightstorm, Microsoft, Singtel, and India-based Tata Communications will jointly build a new submarine cable system connecting India, Malaysia, and Singapore, with consortium partners targeting completion in the fourth quarter of 2029.
In a statement on Thursday, Lightstorm, an AI connectivity platform, said the cable system, named I-2SEA, will link India’s east coast cities of Hyderabad and Chennai directly to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. It will span an estimated 3,600 kilometers from Singapore to Machilipatnam in India, with a second landing in South Chennai.
Lightstorm customers will have the option of connecting into the company’s 30,000-kilometre terrestrial network for onward reach to Hyderabad, Mumbai, and more than 80 data centres nationwide.
The cable can serve hyperscalers, GPU infrastructure providers, and enterprises running AI training and inference workloads across the India-Southeast Asia corridor. When combined with Lightstorm’s low-latency backhaul network in India, I-2SEA can deliver the transmission of any cable on the Singapore and Malaysia to Hyderabad corridor, among the most strategically critical city pairs for AI workloads in the region.
Amajit Gupta, Group CEO and Managing Director of Lightstorm, said the company can now offer the natural extension of its SmartNet AI Fabric platform into the subsea domain, connecting AI regions across India, Malaysia, and Singapore through a single, purpose-built, end-to-end system engineered for the performance and scale that AI infrastructure requires.
Japan’s NEC Corporation will operate as system supplier, thanks to its achievements of deploying submarine cable systems over 450,000 kilometers worldwide.
Singapore-based ASEAN Cableship will cooperate as the marine installation partner. The system features a deep cable burial strategy targeting three-metre depth across buried sections for protection and high uptime, along with carrier-neutral landing infrastructure at both Indian landing points.
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