Australian telecoms company Vocus has announced plans to construct a 4,000km (2,485 mile) fiber route that will connect Brisbane to Darwin.

It is the second project as part of its Australian Digital Infrastructure Platform (ADIP), which aims to support growing demand from hyperscaler, neocloud, and enterprise customers.

The company said it has already started route planning, technical design, and customer engagement activities as part of the new project’s early works phase.

The build will see Vocus connect Brisbane, Townsville, and Darwin, with a new ducted long-haul fibre route that will cover approximately 4,000km and accommodate up to 3,456 fibre strands. Vocus said it expects the fiber route to be ready for service in 2030.

According to Vocus, ADIP serves to address the country's growing fiber capacity requirements driven by AI, cloud, and digital infrastructure investment.

This project covers thousands of new fiber route kilometers, thousands of new fiber pairs, and hundreds of additional terabits of capacity in both subsea and terrestrial networks.

It comes as Vocus-commissioned market research estimates that Australia's data center capacity will triple by 2030, largely due to demands from AI workloads.

“Australia is in a period of unprecedented investment in AI infrastructure, data centers, and international connectivity, requiring exponential investment in new terrestrial and subsea fiber networks. Vocus launched ADIP to build the digital infrastructure Australia needs to compete globally in AI," said Andres Irlando, chief executive officer, Vocus.

“Northern Australia is becoming a critical region for AI, cloud, and digital services, with Queensland and the Northern Territory emerging as important data center precincts and gateways connecting Australia with Asia and the United States.”

The announcement comes a couple of months after Vocus quadrupled capacity on its Adelaide-Perth 2 (AP2) optical route. That route is one of Australia's most critical long-haul fiber corridors.