India’s data centre market is heating up, with Reliance Industries announcing a massive $11-billion investment through its joint venture, Digital Connexion, to build a 1-gigawatt (GW) AI-ready data centre park in Visakhapatnam—the largest single-location project of its kind in the country. This comes at a time when India’s data infrastructure is expanding at record pace, driven by 5G adoption, digitisation, automation, and surging AI workloads.
The move adds to the momentum created by global hyperscalers: Google’s $15 billion investment in Visakhapatnam last year and AWS’s $12.7 billion expansion in Hyderabad in 2023. Indian majors such as TCS, Adani Group, CtrlS, Sify, and others are also scaling rapidly to meet soaring demand for cloud and compute capacity.
India’s growth is also fuelled by data localisation norms and increasing demand from APAC markets, where rising costs and power shortages have made India a preferred alternative. Despite holding less than 1% of global installed capacity (~1.1 GW of 122 GW globally), India is now emerging as a major regional hub.
Industry leaders highlight AI as the biggest catalyst. CtrlS founder Sridhar Pinnapureddy notes that AI’s enormous compute needs will drive unprecedented data centre expansion. New hubs like Visakhapatnam and Hyderabad are gaining prominence as Mumbai, Chennai, and Delhi reach saturation. Visakhapatnam, in particular, is becoming a key landing point for submarine cables connecting to Singapore—Asia’s primary data exchange hub.
According to Nasscom, India’s data centre capacity across the top seven cities has quadrupled in 6–7 years to 1,263 MW, with industry capacity expected to double to 2.3–2.5 GW by 2028. Crisil projects operator revenue to reach ₹20,000 crore annually by FY2028, growing at 20–22% CAGR. The sector is slated to invest ₹55,000–65,000 crorebetween FY26 and FY28, supported by rising EBITDA and stable leverage.
Reliance’s massive entry is expected to further accelerate India’s rise as a global data centre powerhouse.
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