Beneath the boom: The subsea cable contradictions defining India’s digital future

The world’s largest democracy runs on the world’s most precarious digital plumbing. Behind the investment headlines and the AI boom lies a set of contradictions that define where India truly stands and what it must confront in the global subsea cable economy.

The announcements have been spectacular. Google commits USD 15 billion. Meta announces the world’s longest submarine cable, landing in India. Airtel lights up 220 terabits per second of new capacity. Visakhapatnam, until recently a city better known for steel than for silicon, is declared Asia’s next great data centre hub. The narrative writes itself: India has arrived on the global subsea cable map, and the world’s biggest technology companies are falling over each other to plug in.

The narrative is not wrong. But it is incomplete in ways that matter enormously. Behind the investment headlines, India’s cable story is defined not by what is being built, but by a series of deep structural contradictions, between ambition and execution, between geography and governance, between sovereign aspiration and hyperscaler dependency, that the mainstream telling of this story consistently underplays.

What follows is not a celebration of what India has achieved. It is an attempt to surface what India has yet to confront: paradoxes beneath the surface of Asia’s biggest digital infrastructure story.

PARADOX 01
18 percent of the world’s internet users. 1 percent of its cable landing stations
India accounts for approximately 18 percent of the world’s internet user base, more than 900 million people online, with another 300 million to come. It has the world’s cheapest mobile data, the second-largest digital payments market, and a technology services export industry that generates over USD 250 billion a year. By every measure of digital mass, India is a superpower.

By one measure that matters more than almost any other, cable landing stations, the physical points at which the global internet touches Indian soil, India is a rounding error. It hosts just 1 percent of the world’s total cable landing station infrastructure. Singapore, a city-state smaller than Delhi, hosts 26 submarine cables across three landing clusters. The United Kingdom, a country with one-fortieth of India’s population, has more landing-station diversity than India.

1 percent of global cable landing stations. 18 percent of global internet users.
TRAI Chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti, First International Subsea Cables Conference, New Delhi, March 2025.

The TRAI Chairman’s call for a 10x expansion in India’s cable landing infrastructure is not hyperbole. It is arithmetic. The paradox is the most uncomfortable kind: India’s legendary cheap internet,the cheapest per gigabyte anywhere on the planet, was built on a cable foundation that is grotesquely inadequate for the economy it has created. India priced its digital revolution into existence and then failed to build the infrastructure to sustain it at scale.

PARADOX 02
The East Coast has been dark for decades
India has 7,500 kilometres of coastline. It faces three of the world’s four most strategically significant bodies of water for digital traffic: the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and, via the Andaman Sea and the Strait of Malacca, the South China Sea. Its geographic position in the Indian Ocean is unmatched. No other country sits at the junction of the East-West cable axis (Europe to Asia) and the emerging North-South axis (the Gulf and Africa to Southeast Asia and Australia), the way India does.

And yet, for the entirety of India’s cable history, the country’s east coast has been functionally invisible. The Bay of Bengal, facing the Strait of Malacca, through which roughly 40 percent of the world’s total internet traffic passes, has had essentially no significant Indian cable landing infrastructure. Chennai has been the one exception, and Chennai’s reach has been limited. The cables that run from East Asia to Europe through the Strait of Malacca and the Bay of Bengal have, with few exceptions, been routed around India rather than through it, stopping in Sri Lanka, Singapore, or Malaysia, with no significant Indian landing.

The Visakhapatnam gateway, enabled by Google’s America-India Connect initiative and Airtel’s new cable landing station, currently under construction, represents the first serious structural attempt to correct this. Three new cable paths will terminate in Vizag: one to South Africa, one to Singapore and Australia, and one overland path to Chennai. If the Vizag buildout delivers on its timeline, the data centre campus is expected to commission 1 GW of capacity by 2028,India’s east coast will, for the first time, be a genuine player in the East-West cable economy. The question is why it took until 2026 for anyone to make this happen.

PARADOX 03
The cheapest internet in the world runs through the most dangerous waters
“60 percent of India’s internet traffic travels through the Red Sea. It has been disrupted twice in 18 months.”

India offers its citizens the cheapest mobile data on Earth, often under USD 0.10 per gigabyte. This extraordinary price point has been made possible in part by the volume economics of a massive network, in part by intense domestic competition, and in part by a basic infrastructure reality: India’s connectivity to Europe and the United States runs through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, the shortest and most direct maritime route from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

It also runs through a war zone. The Red Sea has been a theatre of active conflict since late 2023, when Yemen’s Houthi rebels began attacking shipping as leverage in the Israel-Hamas war. In February 2024, four major submarine cables, SEACOM, AAE-1, EIG, and TGN, were cut in the Red Sea in rapid succession, causing internet slowdowns across South Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East for months. Repair vessels could not enter the operational area safely. In September 2025, the scenario repeated: multiple cables severed, internet outages across India, West Asia, and the Gulf, with Microsoft Azure confirming service disruption.

Two significant multi-cable cut events in eighteen months. A structural conflict environment showing no signs of resolution. Approximately 60 percent of India’s international internet traffic, including financial markets, cloud services, AI inference workloads, and government communications, transits this same corridor every day. The cheapness of India’s internet has been, in part, paid for by routing it through the world’s most unstable digital chokepoint.

PARADOX 04
India cannot fix its own cables
Here is a fact that receives almost no attention in mainstream coverage of India’s cable ambitions: India does not own a single cable-laying ship. Not one.

Cable repair ships, specialised vessels capable of grappling cables from the ocean floor, splicing broken fibre, and redeploying them, are among the most strategically critical assets in the global digital infrastructure ecosystem. There are only around sixty of them in the world, and their deployment is controlled by a small number of international cable companies and their consortia partners. When a cable breaks in Indian waters, whether due to anchor drag, fishing-trawl interference, seismic activity, or deliberate sabotage, the response depends entirely on the availability and willingness of foreign-controlled vessels.

During the February 2024 Red Sea disruptions, the repair of affected cables was delayed not merely by the security environment but also by the global scarcity of repair vessels: the fleet was already committed to other jobs, and the queue for Indian Ocean repairs stretched into months. India, a country now receiving tens of billions of dollars in cable investment, watched its international connectivity degrade for weeks while waiting for someone else’s ships to arrive.

This is not a failure of planning so much as a failure of imagination, a consequence of treating submarine cables as commercial infrastructure rather than as sovereign critical assets. Countries with serious cable security strategies, Japan, France, and the United States, have either national cable repair capacity or guaranteed access to allied repair fleets. India has neither. The TRAI and ORF roadmaps on cable security recommend landing station diversification, security classification, and regulatory reform. The cable repair ship problem barely features.

PARADOX 05
The southern route is a geopolitical asset India hasn’t claimed
The new cable paths being anchored at Visakhapatnam, Google’s routes to South Africa and to Singapore and Australia, as well as Meta’s Waterworth cable bypassing the Suez Canal via the Cape of Good Hope, constitute something more strategically significant than route diversification. They are the physical infrastructure of a southern digital corridor: a set of high-capacity pathways connecting Europe, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia, with no exposure to the Red Sea chokepoint or the Strait of Hormuz.

India sits at the geographic midpoint of this southern corridor. A cable running from the South African coast to Singapore and Australia must either pass near or through the Indian Ocean in India’s vicinity, and the most efficient routing is one that lands in India, exchanges traffic domestically, and then continues eastward. This is precisely the transit hub model that Singapore built its digital economy on: landing cables, exchanging traffic at a domestic internet exchange point, and re-exporting capacity to the region. India’s coastline and geographic position are far better suited to this role than Singapore’s. It has simply never chosen to play it.

As the Red Sea becomes more structurally insecure, the southern routing will command a premium, from internet service providers, cloud companies, governments with data security requirements, and any enterprise whose operations cannot afford the latency or outage risk of the northern corridor. India, sitting at the junction of both corridors, has a unique window in which to claim the role of resilience gateway for the Indo-Pacific. The America-India Connect cables and Waterworth are creating the physical infrastructure for that role. Whether India has the regulatory clarity and institutional ambition to capture the strategic value is an entirely separate question.

PARADOX 06
The hyperscaler building India’s digital spine is not Indian
The investment numbers are extraordinary: Google’s USD 15 billion America-India Connect commitment, Meta’s Waterworth cable landing, Microsoft’s gigawatt data centre in Vizag alongside AdaniConneX. The pace of deployment is real. The capacity additions are genuine and necessary. And yet the entity constructing what amounts to India’s most significant digital infrastructure buildout in a generation is not the Indian government, not BSNL, not a nationally owned network operator. It is a collection of American corporations whose primary obligation is to their shareholders, whose legal domicile is in California, and whose strategic decisions are ultimately subject to US government jurisdiction.

This is not an argument against the investment; it would be absurd to reject USD 15 billion of cable and data center infrastructure on nationalist grounds when India’s capacity gap is as severe as it is. It is an observation about what India has not yet built: a regulatory and institutional framework that ensures that the infrastructure, once built, serves India’s strategic interests rather than merely American commercial ones.

The mechanism by which this risk manifests is the ‘landing partner’ model, identified in recent analysis by the Financial Times and the ECDPM as a global sovereignty concern. Under this model, a hyperscaler designs, finances, and operationally controls a submarine cable while a domestic telecom operator holds the Indian cable landing licence as a regulatory vehicle. Sify Technologies holds the landing licence for Google’s Raman cable. Airtel is the landing partner for several America-India Connect paths. In the regulatory paperwork, Google appears as a customer or capacity holder rather than as the controlling entity. The arrangement is legal. Whether it is sufficient for a country with India’s strategic ambitions is a question that the government has not yet publicly answered.

The TRUST framework between the US and India and the Quad Cable Connectivity and Resilience Partnership are the diplomatic structures through which this relationship is managed. Both embed India more deeply in American digital infrastructure governance, which is a significant advantage as long as the relationship holds. The question that Indian strategic planners are not yet asking loudly enough is: what is the contingency if it does not?

PARADOX 07
India has the world’s most important transit geography and earns almost nothing from it
Singapore earns billions of dollars annually from its position as the primary cable transit hub for South and Southeast Asia, collecting landing fees, co-location revenue, internet exchange traffic fees, and the broader data centre economic activity that clusters around cable landing points. Amsterdam, Marseille, and Djibouti all play versions of the same role on their respective cable corridors. These are not large countries or exceptional economies. They are well-positioned ones that have built the regulatory and physical infrastructure to capture the value of the traffic flowing through them.

India is the most under-monetized cable transit geography in the world. Cables running from East Asia to Europe pass within striking distance of India’s coastline. Cables running from the Gulf to Southeast Asia transit the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, closer to the Strait of Malacca than to the Indian mainland, sit directly on the world’s busiest internet corridor. None of this geography is being used to generate transit revenue, to attract cable landings from cables that might otherwise bypass India entirely, or to position Indian internet exchange points as regional traffic hubs.

The economic opportunity cost is high. More significant is the strategic opportunity cost: a country that captures transit traffic through its territory builds relationships of dependency with the entities whose traffic flows through it. Singapore’s position as a cable hub is one of the reasons it punches so far above its weight in regional and global technology governance. India, with a vastly more advantageous geographic position, has declined to play this game, not by deliberate choice but due to regulatory complexity, infrastructure underinvestment, and a historical tendency to treat internet infrastructure as a domestic utility rather than an international strategic asset.

The investment wave is real. The contradictions are realer
The subsea cable investment now flowing into India from Google, Meta, Airtel, Tata, and the rest is the most consequential infrastructure buildout India’s digital economy has seen since Jio’s 4G launch in 2016. The capacity additions are necessary and long overdue.
Visakhapatnam’s emergence as a genuine cable gateway is a structural improvement that will benefit India for decades. The southern routing options being established are a genuine resilience gain in an era of Red Sea instability.

But investment is not the same as strategy. Capacity is not the same as control. The seven paradoxes set out in this piece are not complaints about what is being built. They are a framework for understanding what is still missing: the cable repair sovereignty, the transit monetisation, the regulatory clarity on the landing partner question, the east coast infrastructure that should have been built fifteen years ago, and the institutional ambition to claim the geographic position India was given and has consistently failed to use.

India’s cable story is entering its most important chapter. The investment is arriving. The question is whether the strategy has caught up with it yet.