India’s massive data centre investment opportunity revealed

Find out how much investment is required until 2030.

According to a Savills report, the Indian data centre market is still at its nascent stage compared with developed nations such as the USA, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. At present, India’s data centre capacity per million population is notably lower, at less than 1 MW IT, compared to developed countries like the U.S., where it exceeds 50 MW IT per million population. This gap highlights the significant growth potential of India’s market.

“Additional investment of over US$20 billion is required between 2024 and 2030 to complete ongoing and proposed data centre projects of over 2,000 MW IT capacity in the country. These investments cover land, construction, and mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) work, excluding IT infrastructure and equipment,” the report said.

Here’s more from Savills:

Given the country’s rich network connectivity, cost advantages, availability of skilled labour, low climate risk and strong data protection laws, India is well positioned to serve as a leading global data centre hub. We expect data centre stock to increase to 3,050 MW IT by 2030 across the major cities. 

The Tier -II and III cities such as Bhubaneshwar, Patna, Lucknow, Jaipur, Kochi, Vizag, Coimbatore, Madurai and Hubli are expected to witness significant activity due to growing demand for edge data centres in these cities, while dominant Tier-I cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi-NCR, Ahmedabad and Kolkata continue to grow.

Although the major take-up has been from hyperscalers across cities, enterprise colocation is witnessing significant growth. Factors such as high CAPEX and OPEX and other aspects such as the high cost of security systems and high-performance GPUs, and high real estate costs are making it more appealing for enterprises.

Apart from colocation services, data centre operators are increasing their service offerings to networking, private and public cloud, GPU-powered solutions and other managed services. Edge data centres are a big opportunity in India.

Edge data centres are smaller and closer to customers, away from submarine cable networks. Smart City & Digital India initiatives will also create demand for Edge data centres.