HYDERABAD: While Hyderabad has already established itself as an emerging leader in global software development, it is also poised to become a leader in data centres with its power capacity in the city set to grow three-fold in the next two years.
According to the ‘India Data Centre Outlook 2021 H1 2021’ by JLL, the present capacity of data centres in Hyderabad stands at 33 megawatts (MW), while it’s set to increase to 95 MW by 2023, as there is to be an addition of 62.4 MW. During the same period, the capacity of data centres across the country is set to increase from 448 MW to 508 MW in cities such as Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, New Delhi and Pune.
The user demand for data centres in Hyderabad is mainly in cloud technology, telecom, healthcare, banking and financial services, retail and e-commerce, entertainment and media, and energy.
“The current data centres in Hyderabad account for seven per cent of the total capacity. Initiatives by the State government are expected to attract large self-performance enterprises, which builds demand. Enterprise demand led to 3.5 MW absorption during the first half of 2021. Built-to-suit demand by cloud players will be driven by State government’s policy initiatives,” the report highlighted.
According to JLL, Microsoft is reported to be planning a new self-build data centre in the city. This would give a big boost to data centres capacity and would also attract many data centre companies and cloud providers due to the incentives by the State government under Data Centres Policy, uninterrupted power supply and other things.
Under the Data Centres Policy 2016, identifying data centres as a crucial component and the missing piece to complete the already rich ecosystem here, the Telangana government has drafted this policy to plug in the gap and provide to all the stakeholders, a comprehensive IT architecture within the State.
JLL also said that the telecom industry has been gearing for rolling out the 5G services as three telecom players have started field trials. This will lead to a sharp rise in data usage and related applications that would rely on data centres. Demand has been growing exponentially due to increasing digital usage emerging from the distributed workforce, data security and business disruptions.