Mumbai rises as India’s data centre capital

Knight Frank said it was driven by rapid cloud adoption.

Mumbai is rising as India’s data centre capital, accounting for 40% of total national capacity and 44% of live information technology (IT) capacity, according to a Knight Frank report.

In the first half of the year, the city’s capacity rose 14.3% to surpass the 4 gigawatt (GW) milestone, with 591 megawatts (MW) of operational capacity, 185MW under construction, and 3.2GW in the pipeline.

The report said it was driven by rapid cloud adoption, increasing data localisation requirements, and the growth of local fintech and banking, financial services and insurance firms.

This also reflects a tight vacancy rate of just 5.4% versus India’s overall colocation vacancy rate at 12.3%. Also, two-thirds of Mumbai’s capacity under construction at present is already pre-leased.

Yet, with just three live sites currently capable of supporting hyperscale deployments and only one site with available capacity of more than 10MW, there is a short-term supply tightness for big-ticket requirements.

“Such fragmented deployments are opening doors for well-capitalised global players and joint ventures to deliver high-capacity facilities in the region that is currently dominated by local players,” Knight Frank said.