BENGALURU: From Reliance, AdaniConnex to Sify and Amazon Web Services (AWS), many companies in recent times have announced their investment plans in data centres across the country. While AdaniConnex aims to emerge among the top three data centre players by 2030, AWS has increased its investment in data centres.
Experts say India has to seize this massive opportunity and work towards becoming Asia’s data centre hub by 2030. Sunil David, Chair, Intelligent Networks, IET Future Tech Panel, said that from an enterprise standpoint, increased use of IoT will generate massive volumes of data that will require a significant amount of compute and storage infrastructure which will propel an increase in Cloud adoption and that will spur data centre growth.
He said, “With Gen AI emerging as a key focus area for any enterprises and many of them exploring use cases around Gen AI, the need for significant storage and compute power will trigger growth of Cloud.”
Some of the other key drivers are that Global Capability Centres (GCCs) are increasingly becoming cloud engineering hubs. There are close to 1,600 GCCs in India and this is likely to go up to 3,000 in next few years.
“The Digital Personal Data Protection Act passed last year with clear government norms for data localisation and the need to store sensitive citizens personal data within Indian boundaries will also be a key growth driver,” he added.
As per CBRE, India tops major APAC countries with the highest data centre capacity of 950MW in the Asia-Pacific region (excluding China), overtaking major countries like Australia, Hong Kong SAR, Japan, Singapore, and Korea. The report says the country is likely to record the highest capacity addition of 850 MW during the 2024-2026 period, higher than major APAC countries.