A new undersea cable is about to run straight from India's biggest AI data centres to Kuala Lumpur, and it says more about where Malaysia sits on the world's tech map than any product keynote this year. The system, called I-2SEA, has been built for the age of artificial intelligence, and Malaysia is one of only two countries at its Southeast Asian end.
On 3 July, a consortium made up of connectivity firm Lightstorm, Microsoft, Singapore's Singtel and India's Tata Communications confirmed it had signed the build contracts for I-2SEA, short for India to Southeast Asia. Japan's NEC will supply and lay the roughly 3,600 kilometre cable, and ASEAN Cableship will handle the marine installation. The system is targeted to go live in the fourth quarter of 2029.
According to the consortium, the cable links India's AI and hyperscale data-centre clusters in Hyderabad and Chennai with Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. It has been engineered specifically for AI-era traffic. The operators say pairing the subsea route with Lightstorm's terrestrial fibre will deliver the fastest link on the Singapore and Malaysia to Hyderabad corridor, a route that matters for training and running large AI models. Parts of the cable are buried three metres deep to reduce the risk of damage.
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Why Malaysia is suddenly on this map
The choice of Kuala Lumpur is not random. Malaysia has become one of Asia's fastest-growing data-centre markets. Property firm JLL expects national capacity to more than double to around 2,055 megawatts by the end of 2026, with thousands of megawatts more in the pipeline. Johor alone has roughly 850MW live and 1,800MW under construction, and analysts expect it to rival or overtake Singapore on total capacity. Much of that boom is money Singapore turned away: after the city-state capped new data centres for two years, operators such as DayOne poured billions into Johor instead.
Around 25 international submarine cables already land on Malaysian shores, but most treat the country as a place data passes through on the way somewhere else. I-2SEA is different because it terminates here, tying a Malaysian landing point directly into India's AI engine rooms rather than routing around the region.
What it actually means for Malaysian readers
For everyday users, nothing changes at the plug. This is wholesale infrastructure for hyperscalers, GPU providers and enterprises, not a consumer broadband upgrade. The payoff is indirect. Lower-latency, higher-capacity links to India's AI hubs make it cheaper and faster to train and serve AI models from Malaysian soil, which is exactly what the government says it wants. Putrajaya has committed around RM2 billion to a sovereign AI cloud so models can be trained and stored on Malaysian land, and a further RM2 billion to the SALAM domestic subsea cable connecting the peninsula to Sabah and Sarawak.
The harder question is whether Malaysia can feed the machines. Data centres are hungry for power and water, and Johor has already paused some approvals over strain on the grid and water supply. A faster cable does not fix that. If anything it raises the stakes: the more Malaysia sells itself as a regional compute hub, the more its electricity, water and clean-energy plans have to keep pace.
The takeaway: the cable is a vote of confidence, not a finished story. A direct AI link to India lands in 2029. Whether Malaysia turns that pipe into a real advantage depends on what it builds on land between now and then.
Images courtesy of Scott Rodgerson and Taylor Vick on Unsplash.