Thanks to rising internet subscribers and data consumption, as well as more enterprises migrating to cloud and government initiatives for Digital India, India rapidly emerges as one of the major data center hubs, witnessing increasing investments in the sector.
In July, India-based Reliance Industries announced an investment of INR10 billion (US$122 million) to partner with Canada-based Brookfield Infrastructure to build data centers across India. The data center business is one of Reliance's greenfield ventures to complement its green energy business and electronics manufacturing, such as fuel cell gigafactories and a partnership with Sanmina for building hyper-scale data centers.
Japan-based NTT is also eyeing India's data center market. Ravi Kumar, senior vice president of Global Delivery at NTT Data, told Businessline that the company is seeing strong demand in all the data center campuses in construction in India. In 2022, NTT announced an investment of US$2 billion in India's data centers and undersea cables. According to NTT's website, the company has data centers in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Delhi NCR.
According to the Times of India, JLL data shows that data center capacity has doubled from 350 MW in 2019 to 722 MW in 2022 and is expected to reach 1.4 GW by 2025. The report quoted Manoj Paul, managing director of Equinix, saying that India's data center market grew thanks to India's data sovereignty rules, but now data generation by banks, OTT players, and content delivery networks within India has created enough demands for global players to set up data centers and grow in the country.
The Economic Times quoted Sudatta Kar, vice president and head of engineering at Capgemini Engineering, saying that the huge demand can be attributed to increasing Reliance on digital services and transformation in India, and IoT-enabled smart appliances, wearable devices, and industrial sectors also generate huge amounts of data.
Source: Colliers, The Economic Times, September 2023
