The route will be capable of accommodating up to 6,912 fibre cores, 3,456 fibre pairs, and is expected to be ready for service in 2029. Construction will represent approximately $500 million in capital investment and is projected to create more than 1,000 high-value jobs. The Sydney-Melbourne corridor currently carries roughly 40% of Australia’s long-haul data traffic.
Vocus warns the route will become undersupplied without new investment, particularly as AI workloads accelerate demand. The company projects that by 2030, Australian data centre capacity will triple, with AI workloads driving 85-95% of long-haul fibre demand and 70-80% of metro demand. “The AI era runs on high-capacity, diverse fibre networks, the critical arteries that power digital infrastructure ecosystems,” said Vocus CEO Andrés Irlando. “Australia, like many countries in the world, currently lacks sufficient terrestrial and subsea networks to enable existing and future AI workloads.” The route marks the first use of ducted technology on an Australian intercapital corridor, an approach standard among leading AI and cloud providers in North America and Europe, but new to the domestic market. Chief Technology Officer Nikos Katinakis said the method, while more demanding and costly to build, was a deliberate investment in long-term flexibility. “It will allow us to add capacity in the future without breaking ground again or interfering with customers’ active networks.
The approach also offers greater resilience and protection against cable cuts.” ADIP is structured as a multi-year initiative aimed at closing Australia’s fibre capacity gap, with planned investment in thousands of new route kilometres, fibre pairs, and hundreds of terabits of capacity, sited to align with the land, water, and power requirements of large AI workloads. Vocus is backed by Macquarie Asset Management and Aware Super, both of which hold the company as an infrastructure asset. RELATED STORIES Vocus quadruples Adelaide-Perth capacity as AI and cloud drive east-west bandwidth demand Vocus launches Australia’s first private layer 2 network over Starlink ITW Asia 2026 01 December 2026 ITW Asia brings together the whole connectivity and digital infrastructure industry to get business done.
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