A Submarine Cable Purpose-Built to Interconnect AI Regions Across India, Malaysia and Singapore

National : Lightstorm, Asia Pacific’s leading AI connectivity platform, today announced the official signing of the contracts to launch the build of a brand new submarine cable system, connecting India, Malaysia and Singapore, with consortium partners Microsoft, Singtel and Tata Communications. The cable system, to be named as I-2SEA, is designed from the ground up to serve the rapidly growing demand from hyperscalers, GPU infrastructure providers, and enterprises running AI training and inference workloads across the India–Southeast Asia corridor.

I-2SEA links India’s East Coast home to the fastest-growing AI and hyperscaler data center clusters in Hyderabad and Chennai — directly to Singapore, the region’s preeminent cloud interconnect and AI hub, and Malaysia’s emerging data center corridor at Kuala Lumpur. The cable system will have dual landings in India, with one at Machilipatnam providing the shortest subsea access to Hyderabad, and the other at a new diverse landing location in South Chennai. The Lightstorm customers in this cable system will have the option of connecting into Lightstorm’s 30,000+ km terrestrial network for seamless onward reach to Hyderabad, Mumbai, and 80+ data centers nationwide.

Targeted to be Ready-for-Service in Q4 2029, this high-capacity cable of estimated total length of 3600 km from Singapore to Machilipatnam with onward connectivity to Hyderabadwhen coupled with Lightstorm’s low latency backhaul network in India, is expected to deliver fastest transmission of any cable on the Singapore/Malaysia–Hyderabad corridor, the most strategically critical city pair for AI workloads in the region.

“Lightstorm works around a single mission: interconnecting intelligence. As majority owner of I-2SEA and with SmartNet AI Fabric already delivering AI-ready transport across data centers and GPU clusters in India, we can now offer the natural extension of that platform into the subsea domain. 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.”

— Amajit Gupta, Group CEO & MD, Lightstorm

I-2SEA, for Lightstorm customers, will integrate Lightstorm’s SmartNet AI Fabric — engineered for low-jitter, loss-optimized transport across data centers, cloud hubs, and distributed AI zones — into the subsea domain. Lightstorm operates 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 features an Interoperable cable architecture and carrier-neutral landing infrastructure at both Indian landing points. Combined with Lightstorm’s Polarin platform for on-demand provisioning and real time network visibility, Lightstorm customers can activate, scale and monitor I-2SEA capacity with speed and flexibility.

Built with resilience at its core, the system utilises optimal route planning combined with a deep cable burial strategy that targets three-meter depth across the entire network for the buried sections. This gives the I-2SEA cable system high level of protection and high uptime.

The I-2SEA consortium operates under a Joint Build Agreement among Lightstorm, Microsoft, Singtel and Tata Communications. NEC Corporation has been appointed as system supplier and ASEAN Cableship Pte Ltd (ACPL) as marine installation partner. The system is now open for capacity commitments.