NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel’s data centre subsidiary Nxtra Data is planning to invest Rs 1,750 crore in its data security and cloud infrastructure network. The capital expenditure is being driven by an earlier investment from US-based Carlyle Group, which had shelled out $235 million for a 25 per cent stake in Nyxtra earlier this summer. The rest of the equity is held by Bharti Airtel.
Nxtra’s 10 large data centres and 120 plus edge data centres provide its clients with co-location services, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery, and remote infrastructure management. Recently, the Caryle Group through its entities announced an investment of $235 million (around Rs 1,750 crore) for a 25 per cent stake in Nxtra at a post money valuation of $1.2 billion. “Nxtra will use the proceeds from this transaction to continue scaling up its infrastructure and offerings across India,” Airtel said in a statement.
The company also announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation, under which the telco will set up for two new data centre campuses in the state--at Mumbai and Pune. Nxtra Data already operates two large data centres in Maharashtra in addition to multiple edge data centres spread across Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Thane, Pune, Nagpur and Kolhapur.
While announcing the Carlyle investment earlier, Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO (India and South Asia), Bharti Airtel had said that there was now a “massive growth opportunity for data centres in India” and added that Airtel planned to accelerate investments in the space. According to Airtel, the expansion of hyperscalers across the region following the government’s directive on data localization is propelling a lot of demand for such services and an increase in cloud penetration.