A consortium of six companies — Microsoft, Singapore headquartered Lightstorm, Tata Communications, Singtel, Singapore's Asean Cableship, and Japan's NEC Corporation — is jointly building the I 2SEA subsea cable system from India's east coast to
I-2SEA, a new subsea cable consortium announced this month, is not simply the 3,600 km of fiber running from India's east coast to Malaysia and Singapore. It is the question of who holds the capacity rights and who controls the landing stations on a corridor that already carries the bulk of Asia's data traffic — and for banks, payment operators, and trade-finance corridors that depend on that traffic, the ownership map of the next India-ASEAN link may matter more than the engineering.
A consortium of six companies, including Microsoft, Singapore-headquartered Lightstorm, Tata Communications, Singtel, Singapore's Asean Cableship, and Japan's NEC Corporation, according to the Business Times, said they would jointly build the I-2SEA cable system, with landing stations in Machilipatnam on India's Andhra Pradesh coast, in Malaysia, and in Singapore. The consortium did not disclose the investment size or the cable's capacity, and the operational target is Q4 2029, per Lightstorm Group CEO and managing director Amajit Gupta. The consortium framed the project as capacity for AI, cloud, and hyperscale workloads.
That framing places I-2SEA inside a structural shift in how subsea cables are built and paid for. Traditional Asia-region cables were consortium plays anchored by incumbent telecoms, with capacity sold to enterprises and carriers on long contracts. The I-2SEA line-up blends two new profiles into that model: a hyperscaler anchor (Microsoft) supplying guaranteed offtake, and an infrastructure-fund-backed independent operator (Lightstorm, backed by I Squared Capital) supplying project finance and construction management. Tata Communications and Singtel contribute the regional landing-party experience that newcomers lack. NEC brings the cable-laying and system-integration role typically held by Subcom or Alcatel Submarine Networks.
The financial-infrastructure question is concentrated in three places the consortium has so far left undefined.
First, the landing stations. Machilipatnam is the same Indian location where Meta and Alphabet have separately announced data centre campuses, anchoring the cable directly into hyperscaler build-outs rather than into a generic carrier hotel. The consortium has not disclosed which of its members owns the landing-station real estate at each end, or whether landing rights have been secured through long-term lease, joint venture, or purchase. Landing-party ownership is a control point: the party that owns the beach manhole and the backhaul fibre typically decides who can light capacity on the system and on what terms.
Second, the capacity and the capex. The consortium has not disclosed a Tbps figure for I-2SEA, nor an investment total. The omission is itself a signal. Hyperscaler-anchored systems are usually structured around an anchor tenant that buys a large share of design capacity under a 15- to 25-year indefeasible-right-of-use (IRU) agreement, with the remaining capacity sold to carriers and enterprises. Without a public number, it is hard to estimate how much of the system Microsoft has pre-committed to, what Lightstorm's equity contribution looks like relative to its reported US$1.5 billion India-IPO target, or whether the consortium expects the cable to be debt-financed through a project-finance facility.
Third, the corridor economics. Undersea cables carry roughly 95% of global internet traffic, and India currently has 17 active submarine cables with combined maximum potential capacity of around 960 Tbps, with at least 10 more publicly announced, according to TeleGeography data cited by Hindu BusinessLine. On the data-centre side, India's operational capacity is roughly 1.4 GW today and could double by 2027 from projects under construction, and could rise roughly fivefold by 2030 if planned projects are fast-tracked, per Macquarie Equity Research figures reported by Emirates 24/7. I-2SEA enters a market being supplied aggressively on both the cable and the data-centre side, and the Machilipatnam landing appears designed to sit on top of the new Indian hyperscaler campuses rather than serve generic carrier traffic.
The Japan angle is more than geographic adjacency. Lightstorm currently connects 19 AI and cloud zones across India via terrestrial fibre, and the consortium said the I-2SEA link is expected to lift that count to 29 zones, broadening the on-net footprint that any Japanese bank, payment operator, or cooperative lender would need to reach if it wants to ride the same backbone into Indian enterprise and BFSI customers. The investment scale and pricing of the new cable, and any subsequent IRU resales, will feed directly into the cost and redundancy of Japan-India trade-finance, remittance, and capital-markets data flows that pass through Singapore.
For now, the watch items are concrete. The consortium has not yet published a supplier allocation between NEC and any second vendor, has not filed the capex split, and has not confirmed landing-party terms at any of the three endpoints. Lightstorm's planned mid-2027 India listing is reported, not confirmed, and a public valuation near the reported US$1.5 billion mark would put a price tag on the cable-build programme. Until those numbers land, I-2SEA reads as a structural signal of how Asia's next round of subsea capacity is going to be financed, rather than as a finished piece of infrastructure to be benchmarked against the existing 17 active cables.