Submer and BSNL Sign MoU to Explore AI-Ready Data Center Development Across India

Submer India Private Limited and BSNL Tower Corporation Limited (BTCL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to explore the development of sovereign, AI-ready data center infrastructure across India. The agreement, signed this week at the India Mobile Congress 2026, brings together a specialist in immersion cooling and modular data center infrastructure with India's fourth-largest mobile operator, whose nationwide footprint spans fiber services, thousands of cell towers, and a portfolio of telephone exchanges supporting its legacy copper network.

The partnership reflects a broader push by India to build domestic compute capacity capable of supporting artificial intelligence workloads at scale, as demand for GPU-as-a-Service and sovereign cloud infrastructure accelerates across the country. Under the MoU, the two companies will jointly assess opportunities in GPU-as-a-Service, sovereign AI cloud infrastructure, Edge and micro data centers, and larger-scale data center projects of up to 20MW. They will also evaluate the suitability of BSNL's existing premises and data center facilities for transformation into distributed Edge infrastructure. BSNL currently operates nine data centers across India, located in New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Faridabad, Alappuzha, Bangalore, Jaipur, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Ludhiana.

Shri Robert Jerard Ravi, BSNL chairman and managing director, said the agreement marks an important step in evaluating how BSNL's nationwide infrastructure and connectivity footprint can support sovereign AI capabilities, adding that the collaboration with Submer will help explore an infrastructure model designed around India's long-term digital priorities.

Anupam Shrivastava, head of Submer India, said India has the talent, demand, and digital reach to become a global AI infrastructure leader, and that the next step is to build the physical capacity that turns that ambition into deployable compute. He added that the partnership with BTCL brings infrastructure, network reach, and engineering expertise into one model, with the goal of making sovereign AI capacity available where it is needed, from strategic Edge locations to large-scale AI data centers.

Submer, founded in Spain in 2015, originally focused on immersion cooling before expanding into data center development and AI cloud services through its Rubix Data Centers and Radian Arc units. The company also offers modular data center infrastructure through its new Corenix business. Its move with BSNL adds to a series of India-focused initiatives this year. Radian Arc, Submer's AI cloud subsidiary, is set to deploy its GPU-as-a-Service offering within GTPL Broadband's network and in TeleIndia Datacentre (Datasamudra) facilities in the country. Submer has also announced plans to deploy 1GW of liquid-cooled AI data centers in Madhya Pradesh and has partnered with Indian real estate developer Anant Raj to develop data centers in India.

The MoU underscores a growing trend among telecom operators and infrastructure specialists to repurpose existing network assets, including exchanges and tower sites, into distributed compute nodes capable of serving latency-sensitive AI applications at the edge. For BSNL, the collaboration could unlock new revenue streams from its extensive real estate and connectivity assets while supporting national ambitions around data sovereignty and AI self-reliance. For Submer, the agreement expands its presence in one of the world's fastest-growing data center markets, where demand for AI-ready capacity continues to outpace supply.