Tata Communications announced that it is partnering with RailTel Corporation of India to fortify the latter’s fiber backbone infrastructure to support AI development in the country.
Tata said the partnership aims to combine RailTel’s deep national reach with Tata’s digital fabric of global networks, cloud, and omnichannel communication platforms, as well as its cybersecurity expertise, to modernise and secure network infrastructure.
RailTel, a Navaratna PSU (public service undertaking), operates a neutral telecom network with over 63,000 route km of optical fibre connecting cities, towns, rural regions and more than 6,000 railway stations.
Tata and RailTel said the network upgrade will strengthen cyber protection, enhance customer experiences, enable secure and sovereign cloud adoption for sensitive workloads, and leverage advanced AI-enabled platforms that improve visibility, reliability and performance of digital operations.
On the business front, RailTel said the project will boost its ability to deliver more advanced services across its existing offerings in data centres, managed services, cloud and cybersecurity. Meanwhile, Tata sees it as a way to extend its digital fabric into critical public and enterprise environments at national scale, supporting some of the country’s most important digital services.
RailTel said the project will also mean faster connectivity, more resilient systems and stronger data safeguards for the ministries, state governments, PSUs and enterprises that use its network, as well as better performance and reliability for consumer-facing services such as railway Wi-Fi, public broadband, surveillance systems and digital governance platforms.
“RailTel has always played a foundational role in connecting India,” said RailTel chairman and MD Sanjai Kumar. “The collaboration with Tata Communications allows us to strengthen that role by bringing in advanced capabilities that will help our customers modernise their systems, improve resilience and serve citizens more effectively.”
“As India moves from digital adoption to AI leadership, our collaboration with RailTel is building the backbone for a secure, smart, and sovereign future,” said Sumeet Walia, chief sales and marketing officer at Tata Communications, in a statement. “By delivering, robust, AI-ready infrastructure from the centre to the edge, we are empowering a resilient India.”
India is aggressively making moves to boost its domestic AI capabilities to position the country as a major AI development hub, with a number of AI-related deals announced at last week’s India AI Impact Summit 2026 in Delhi.
Among them, Tata Communications’ parent company, Tata Group, signed a partnership deal with OpenAI to expand access to AI in India by developing local, AI-ready data centre capacity with another Tata subsidiary, Tata Consultancy Services.
Google Cloud announced its America-India Connect initiative to build three new subsea cables connecting India to the US via South Africa, Singapore and Australia as part of its grand plan to establish an AI hub in India.
Indian conglomerate Adani Group unveiled plans to invest US$100 billion in renewable energy-backed, AI-ready data centres by 2035, more than doubling its current capacity.
Microsoft also talked up its plans to narrow the “AI divide” at the summit, saying it remains on track to invest US$50 billion by 2030 to expand access to AI across emerging markets in the Global South.
