Lightstorm Names 3,600km I-2SEA Cable On India-Singapore AI Route
Light Reading reported that Lightstorm is leading Microsoft, Singtel and Tata Communications in the 3,600km I-2SEA subsea cable, with fourth-quarter 2029 service planned for India, Malaysia and Singapore. Financing, pricing and signed customer commitments remain undisclosed.
Lightstorm is leading a consortium to build a 3,600km submarine cable linking India, Malaysia and Singapore, with service planned for the fourth quarter of 2029.
The I-2SEA system is designed to extend connectivity between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and India’s east coast, while supporting the expanding infrastructure demands of AI workloads, Light Reading reported.
The new India-Southeast Asia link
I-2SEA will connect Singapore and Kuala Lumpur directly to Hyderabad and Chennai.
Lightstorm will operate landing stations in Machilipatnam, in Andhra Pradesh, and South Chennai.
Microsoft, Singtel and Tata Communications are the other consortium partners.
No financial details for the cable project were disclosed.
NEC Corporation has been appointed system supplier, and ASEAN Cableship Pte Ltd. will handle marine installation.
The system is now open for capacity commitments.
Lightstorm says the cable has been engineered for hyperscalers, GPU infrastructure providers and enterprises running AI training and inference.
CEO and Managing Director Amajit Gupta said the project extends the company’s SmartNet AI Fabric from Indian data centers and GPU clusters into the subsea network.
“On our network, AI regions across India, Malaysia, and Singapore will be connected by a single, purpose-built, end-to-end system,” Gupta said, describing a system engineered for the performance and scale required by AI infrastructure.
Capacity, landing points and AI zones
The new link is expected to increase Lightstorm’s connectivity from 19 AI and cloud zones to 29 across India.
Customers will also be able to connect to the company’s 30,000km terrestrial network, reaching Hyderabad, Mumbai and more than 80 data centers nationwide.
Machilipatnam places one landing station near data-center development announced by Meta and Alphabet in Andhra Pradesh.
The location also offers the shortest and most direct subsea access to Hyderabad.
Combined with Lightstorm’s low-latency Indian backhaul network, I-2SEA is intended to serve the Singapore-Malaysia-Hyderabad corridor, which the company identifies as a strategically important route for AI workloads in the region.
Tata’s wider corridor investment
Tata Communications confirmed its participation in I-2SEA earlier in the week.
The company said the system would connect Chennai and Singapore and also targeted fourth-quarter 2029 service.
Tata separately announced that it had acquired significant fiber capacity on a Mumbai-Singapore subsea system.
Its broader subsea infrastructure investment totals $152 million and is expected to add 98 Tbit/s of AI-ready capacity to the India-Singapore digital corridor.
Genius Wong, Tata Communications’ executive vice president of Core and Next-Gen Connectivity Services and chief technology officer, said the investments would strengthen the reliability, scalability and performance of connectivity serving enterprises, cloud providers and hyperscalers across the corridor.
