HYDERABAD: Telecommunication giant Bharti Airtel on Wednesday announced that it would set up a Rs 2,000 crore data centre in Telangana. The announcement came on Day-3 of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is being held in Davos, Switzerland.
Earlier in the day, IT and Industries Minister KT Rama Rao met Bharti Airtel group’s founder and chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal and vice-chairman Rajan Bharti Mittal.
The Bharti Airtel group, through its data centre arm — Nxtra Data Centers — will invest an amount of Rs 2,000 crore as capital investment for the infrastructure of a ‘hyperscale’ data centre with a capacity of 60 megawatts (MW) of IT load for the first phase. The project is estimated to be deployed in the next five to seven years.
After the announcement, Rama Rao said, “I am very happy to see Airtel-Nxtra Data Centers invest in Telangana. Hyderabad is not the hub for Hyperscale Data Centres in India and Airtel’s investment adds to the pace we look to keep up. I hope to continue this relationship and hope the State can work together with Airtel-Nxtra to work on creating digital infrastructure to keep up with the ever-growing industry in the State.”
“This is one of our biggest greenfield data centre projects in India and we are happy to be working with Telangana. Since the initiation of our discussions on the project in the May 2022 edition of the WEF Annual Meeting, the government has worked at a very quick pace to ensure the project can get into construction (phase) in a matter of a few months,” said Sunil Mittal.