Data Centres growth

India’s digital transformation is expected to create an economic value of $1 trillion by 2025. Apart from existing sectors, new areas like agriculture, healthcare, logistics, jobs and skills market, e-governance and other areas, coupled with advanced technologies, will lead to significant growth of data storage and computing. Owing to their locations and infrastructure, Mumbai and Chennai are expected to be the largest beneficiaries of potential growth in India’s data centre market,” say experts.

India’s data centre industry is witnessing the growth to achieve a trillion-dollar digital economy by 2025 and Mumbai and Chennai have been identified as major accelerators of capacity expansion.

The Nxtra by Airtel and JLL India’s joint study highlights that while India’s data centre future will largely depend on coastal cities with ready access to cable landing stations, landlocked cities like Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Kolkata, and Pune will also be beneficiaries of a growing data centre industry.

Chennai with its host of infrastructure advantages like the highest internet speeds in the country, availability of submarine cable landing infrastructure, land supply, green energy options, supportive government policies and skilled manpower will emerge as the next data centre hub after Mumbai, said the study titled - Data Centres: The building blocks of digital revolution in India by JLL and Nxtra.

It projected that the expansion of the Indian data centre industry will be supported by the accelerated adoption of digital infrastructure led by the pandemic, rising digital usage, cloud consumption and the national 5G rollout.

It said that much of the industry growth will centre around Mumbai and Chennai due to their business and infrastructure advantages, strategic location, and cable landing stations that are well-positioned to support and enable the growth of data centres across India.

Further, the study also shows that the convergence of data protection, strong demand from cloud players, migration from captive to cloud, industry-friendly regulations, government’s digital initiatives, and investments will spearhead the ongoing growth of the data centre industry in India.

The report outlines, Delhi NCR region’s data centre industry has been supported by regulatory incentives and has the potential for large demand from government organisations. Secondly, Pune has developed as a disaster recovery location for banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) players due to its proximity to Mumbai.

Whereas, Bengaluru has a higher proportion of on-premises data centres operated by global in-house centres of global technology firms. Kolkata located in the densely populated eastern region of India is expected to have a new cable landing station in the next few years and will emerge as an important location, it added.

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA