NEW DELHI: After a successful stint in the real estate industry, property tycoon Niranjan Hiranandani is setting his sight on what he believes could become another big moneymaker: Selling data storage services to companies such as Amazon and Alphabet or the parent company of Google.
Marking a foray into the digital technology infrastructure sector that India is looking to accelerate, Mumbai-based real estate developer Hiranandani Group has lined up investments of nearly Rs 15,000 crore over the next five to seven years for setting up data centres in Panvel in the outskirts of Mumbai and Chennai.
The company has launched its business venture ‘YOTTA’ Infrastructure -- a 100 per cent subsidiary of the Hiranandani Group -- which will offer hyper-density, hyper-scalable data centre and co-location solutions to enterprises along with a whole array of supporting managed IT, hybrid multi-cloud and security services. Being built over 18-acre land parcel, the company’s first data centre park in Panvel which would comprise five buildings with a total size of around 30 lakh square feet will be operational by December 2019.
“This year we are looking at spending about Rs. 1,000 crore into our first data centre in Panvel. This will be followed by 11 such centres that we plan to set up in other parts of Mumbai and Chennai over a period of time,” Niranjan Hiranandani, founder and managing director, Hiranandani Group told Express. The data parks will be spread over 50 acres near major international fiber landing stations with server hall capacity of over 60,000 racks and 500 MW power.
The real estate group has roped in Netmagic’s former executive director Sunil Gupta as the CEO of Yotta. “With growth of technologies like IoT and Big Data becoming mainstream, vast amounts of data will be created in complex formats that will need massive data centre infrastructure. This is the right time to enter this segment,” he said.
Hiranandani, who is also the president of National Real Estate Development Council, pointed out that the demand for data centre is massive and “we are here to fill the demand-supply gap in the market.”
“We envision a huge opportunity with data localisation and protection act to be announced soon by the government in order to regulate the data management business. This will give a big impetus to the data storage business to grow domestically at an exponential pace bringing the paradigm shift to the Indian economy,” he added.
To support the power needs, the Group will also be setting up a 60 MW solar power plant in Maharashtra that the company said should be able to start generating at least 30 MW power by early next year. “This will help us in bringing down the data centre cost by 20 per cent,” Hiranandani added.