I-2SEA Subsea Cable System Planned to Link India, Malaysia and Singapore

The I-2SEA consortium—Lightstorm, Microsoft, Singtel and Tata Communications—has announced plans to develop a new subsea fibre-optic system linking India, Malaysia and Singapore. NEC announced that it had secured a contract to supply the cable system.

The planned system is approximately 3,600 km in total length and is targeted to enter service in the fourth quarter of 2029. It remains a planned project; the stated service date is a target rather than confirmation of commissioning.

In India, the route is expected to have two cable landing points: Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh and southern Chennai. Lightstorm plans to connect Machilipatnam to inland locations, including Hyderabad, through its terrestrial fibre network.

The consortium positions I-2SEA as infrastructure for interconnecting AI regions across India, Malaysia and Singapore. For data-center and cloud infrastructure markets, the project illustrates how demand for AI and cloud capacity can extend beyond server infrastructure and intra-data-center networks to cross-border backbone connectivity.

More broadly, I-2SEA could reinforce the role of subsea systems, landing infrastructure and terrestrial fibre networks in serving distributed AI and cloud clusters across India and Southeast Asia. The available information does not quantify the data-center capacity or AI workload volumes the cable is expected to support.