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Andhra Pradesh's coast, led by Visakhapatnam, is emerging as India's third international submarine cable landing hub after Mumbai and Chennai.
The shift is driven by hyperscaler AI investment — Google's Visakhapatnam AI hub, backed by a commitment of about $15 billion, includes a new international subsea gateway.
The I-2SEA cable system, being built by Lightstorm with Microsoft, Singtel and Tata Communications, will run about 3,600 km from Singapore, landing at Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh and in south Chennai.
Submarine cables carry over 95% of intercontinental internet, voice and financial data; satellites handle only a sliver.
TRAI has argued India needs a manifold increase in cable landing stations, which today cluster in just five coastal cities.
At a shore terminal, lasers convert digital data into pulses of light that travel through hair-thin glass fibres by total internal reflection. Because the light weakens over distance, optical repeaters are spliced into the line every 60-80 km to boost the signal across thousands of kilometres of seabed. The cable comes ashore at a Cable Landing Station, where the optical signal is decoded, amplified and routed into the country's terrestrial fibre backbone, cloud regions and data centre clusters. Deep-ocean sections can be as thin as a garden hose, while near-shore sections — where anchors and trawlers are the real threat — are heavily armoured with steel wire, aluminium water barriers and polyethylene sheathing. Networks also build in route diversity, so traffic fails over to another path when one seabed segment is cut.
Simple Analogy: Think of it as an undersea expressway for light. The repeaters are service stations that top up the light's brightness, and the Cable Landing Station is the exit ramp where the expressway merges into the country's ordinary road network.
India's submarine cable geography runs down both coasts. Mumbai on the Arabian Sea faces the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Chennai, Machilipatnam and Visakhapatnam on the Bay of Bengal face Southeast Asia and Australia. Kochi, Tuticorin and Thiruvananthapuram host the southern landings. Machilipatnam and Visakhapatnam both lie in Andhra Pradesh, whose capital is Amaravati.
GS Paper 3 > Infrastructure; Science & Technology; Internal Security (critical infrastructure)
General Awareness > Science & Technology, Current Affairs
General Awareness > Digital economy and infrastructure
The coastal facility where an international submarine cable comes ashore and its traffic is routed into the domestic terrestrial fibre network.
An amplifier spliced into a submarine cable every 60-80 km to strengthen the light signal over long distances.
A very large cloud or AI operator such as Google or Microsoft that now funds and owns submarine cables directly instead of joining carrier consortia.
Spreading international bandwidth across multiple geographically distinct cable paths so traffic can fail over when one route is cut.