Indian infrastructure firm Henox IT and Data Centers has unveiled plans for a subsea cable, Henox Crest, designed to create a chain of new carrier-neutral landing hubs along India's coastline rather than add capacity at the country's two dominant gateways, Mumbai and Chennai.

The planned system would run as a coastal digital infrastructure corridor linking Gujarat, Mangaluru, Kochi, Chennai and Visakhapatnam. Today, India's international internet capacity is concentrated mainly into Mumbai on the west coast and Chennai on the east coast — a topology that concentrates risk as well as traffic.

Henox said the western hub in Gujarat will serve as a focal point for data centres, hyperscalers and financial institutions, with onward connectivity extending to the UAE, the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

How would the east side connect?

On the opposite coast, Henox Crest would interconnect with SubConnex at Visakhapatnam, giving operators onward routes towards Singapore, Malaysia and the US west coast. Henox frames this as positioning India as a bridge between some of the world's most important digital markets.

Each landing point on the system would function as an open point of presence, where operators can connect their networks, exchange traffic and build new subsea and terrestrial systems. In Henox's description, this turns a single point of concentration into a distributed, resilient backbone.

Why does route diversity matter now?

The company pitches the project against a recent spate of subsea cable disruptions, which have exposed the fragility of routing international traffic through a handful of established landing stations. By spreading traffic across multiple carrier-neutral points, Henox Crest aims to reduce single points of failure and give carriers, hyperscalers and enterprises more route diversity.

The demand side of the argument rests on AI, cloud and hyperscale data centres, all of which will need international internet capacity that India's current two-gateway architecture strains to serve. Beyond the cable itself, Henox plans an integrated ecosystem of subsea cables, terrestrial networks, edge data centres and strategic compute infrastructure along the corridor — bringing connectivity and compute closer to emerging demand centres and enabling low-latency access to AI, cloud, enterprise and digital services, according to CEO Shaktivel K.

"Henox Crest is designed to create a high-speed coastal backbone that both powers the AI era and diversifies how India connects to the world – carrier-neutral, open to all, and creating new hubs where operators can build," Shaktivel K said in a statement.

Who is backing the plan?

Henox has partnered with APTelecom as its strategic technical and commercial partner. The advisory firm will support the project across strategic planning, commercial development, ecosystem engagement and international partnerships.

The announcement so far is a plan, not a construction contract: Henox has disclosed no cable capacity figures, no vendor supply agreement and no in-service date. The stated intent, though, is clear — a distributed coastal backbone built around open access rather than the closed landing arrangements that have historically characterised India's international connectivity market. Whether hyperscalers and carriers commit to the new hubs will determine if Henox Crest becomes infrastructure or a corridor on paper.