Now Reading: Tata Communications to build ₹4,350 crore AI super highway
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Tata Communications to build ₹4,350 crore AI super highway
The Story in Brief
Tata Communications on Monday (26 October 2026) announced a ₹4,350 crore ($400 to 450 million) investment to build approximately 10,000 km of AI-ready fibre network across India, which it is calling the 'AI Super Highway'. The network will add about 6 petabits per second of capacity to its existing 1.25 Pbps infrastructure and will be funded from operating cash flows.
The first phase will link the Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad-Chennai corridor, expected to go live within three years. Subsequent phases will extend to Vizag, Bhubaneswar, Jamnagar and GIFT City, connecting data centre clusters with international cable landing stations. The company estimates India's data centre-to-data centre connectivity market could exceed $1 billion over the medium term. MD and CEO Ganesh Lakshminarayanan said a growing part of the expansion is backed by anchor customer commitments.
Indian Opinion Analysis
All three outlets reported Tata Communications' ₹4,350 crore ($450 million) AI super highway investment in straight news style, drawing on the same company announcement and executive quotes. The Economic Times led with the rupee figure and the three-phase timeline extending to FY36, while CNBC-TV18 and Mint led with the dollar amount and a 3 to 5 year horizon. Mint added the sharpest context, citing Cushman & Wakefield data on India's 1.8 GW operational data centre capacity and CBRE's $173 billion cumulative investment figure, and named competitor Lightstorm's parallel $500 million AI corridor project. The other two outlets omitted this competitive and industry-backdrop detail. All three attributed the $1 billion addressable market estimate and anchor-customer backing to MD Ganesh Lakshminarayanan identically. The coverage was uniform straight reporting throughout.
Coverage: 3 sources, 3 neutral
Sources (3): economictimes.indiatimes.com (neutral report), cnbctv18.com (neutral report), livemint.com (neutral report)
This brief was synthesised by AI from the 3 sources linked above, so one read covers every framing they carry. Methodology and corrections.
