CHENNAI: Singapore-based office space solutions provider Ascendas-Singbridge Group plans to invest $1 billion in five years to build large-scale data centres in Chennai, Mumbai and Hyderabad for which it has sought relaxation in building norms, according to official sources.
It hopes to cater to the requirements of hyper-scale cloud providers, such as Alibaba, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and other IT majors that are looking for mega-sized purpose-built data centres in India, which are currently not available.
Hyper-scale data centres in Tamil Nadu will spur the growth of commerce, Internet of Things (IoT) adaptation and digital transformation of Indian cities into smart cities.
Housing of hyper-scale data centres requires around 50,000 sqm space. While the exact site where the data centre will come up is not known, state government sources said officials from Ascendas-Singbridge had held regular meetings with the information technology secretary, the industries secretary and the housing secretary in this regard. They have also submitted a proposal to the state government.
A typical data centre with a built-up space of 20,000 sqm can house 60,000 servers; a land parcel of 50,000 sqm an hold as many as 1.5 lakh servers.
Official sources said construction and operation of large-scale data centres will generate huge benefits, including job creation in information technology, manufacturing and service industries, purchase of telecom bandwidth and acceleration of e-commerce growth.
According to market monitor and forecast company 451 Research, India’s collocation and hosting market can generate an annual revenue of $2 billion by 2019, up from $1.3 billion in 2016 with most of the growth focussed on Mumbai, Chennai, New Delhi and Bangalore.
Why it is a big deal
India’s hosting market is expected to generate $2bn annual revenue by 2019 up from $1.3bn in 2016
Most of the growth will be focussed on metropolitan centres of Chennai, Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore
Annual revenue growth of $700m from 2016-19 will require investment of over $1trillion in building construction and data centre power and cooling fit-outs