Submer and BSNL's tower subsidiary have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to explore AI-ready data center projects across India, including builds of up to 20MW. The two firms inked the deal this week at the India Mobile Congress 2026.

Submer India Private Limited and BSNL Tower Corporation Limited (BTCL), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Indian telco, will jointly assess three areas of opportunity:

• GPU-as-a-Service and sovereign AI cloud infrastructure
• Edge and micro data centers
• Larger-scale data center projects of up to 20MW

The partners will also evaluate whether BSNL's existing premises and data center facilities can be converted into distributed Edge infrastructure.

What does the MoU actually commit to?

Nothing gets built yet. The agreement is an exploration framework, not a construction contract. What it changes is access: Submer gets a potential foothold in BSNL's nationwide real estate and connectivity footprint, while the state telco gets a partner with liquid cooling, modular build and AI cloud credentials.

BSNL chairman and MD Shri Robert Jerard Ravi framed the deal in sovereign terms. "This MoU marks an important step in evaluating how BSNL's nationwide infrastructure and connectivity footprint can support sovereign AI capabilities," he said. "Our collaboration with Submer will help us explore an infrastructure model designed around India's long-term digital priorities."

Who brings what to the table?

BSNL, founded in 2000, is India's fourth-largest mobile operator and also runs fiber services nationally. Its existing estate is substantial: nine data centers spread across New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Faridabad, Alappuzha, Bangalore, Jaipur, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Ludhiana, plus a portfolio of telephone exchanges serving its legacy copper network and thousands of cell towers carrying its 4G and 5G traffic.

Submer, founded in 2015 in Spain, started in immersion cooling and has since broadened into full data center development and AI cloud services through its Rubix Data Centers and Radian Arc units. Its newer Corenix business sells modular data center infrastructure.

Anupam Shrivastave's pitch puts capacity ahead of everything else. "India has the talent, demand, and digital reach to become a global AI infrastructure leader. The next step is to build the physical capacity that turns that ambition into deployable compute," the Submer India head said. "Our goal is clear: make sovereign AI capacity available where it is needed, from strategic Edge locations to large-scale AI data centers."

Is this Submer's first move in India?

Far from it. This year alone the Spanish firm has stacked up several commitments in the country:

• Radian Arc, its AI cloud subsidiary, will deploy GPU-as-a-Service inside GTPL Broadband's network and in TeleIndia Datacentre (Datasamudra) facilities
• Submer plans 1GW of liquid-cooled AI data centers in Madhya Pradesh
• The company has partnered with Indian real estate developer Anant Raj on data center development

For context, that 1GW Madhya Pradesh commitment alone dwarfs the up-to-20MW ceiling in the new MoU. The BSNL deal is less about scale and more about distribution, tapping a telco's dispersed sites for Edge capacity close to users.

For practitioners, the signal is clear: sovereign AI capacity in India is moving from policy talk to site-level evaluation, and telco real estate is now firmly in play as a substrate for it.