Bharti Airtel is planning to invest around Rs3,500 crore over three years to expand its data centre capacity to three to five times from the current 100 MW, in a bid to tap into the increasing need to store digital information locally amid a strong uptake in digital payments and the imminent launch of 5G services.
Bharti Airtel is planning to build as many as eight new data centres which would also include data parks. It should be noted that each data park is expected to store as much as 100 MW capacity. Just last year, United States (US)-based private equity major Carlyle Group had bought a 25 per cent stake in Nxtra Data at a valuation of $1.2 billion.
The development comes as the data centre space has attracted a lot of attention lately. Earlier this year, Ahmedabad-based Adani Group had also entered into the data centre space by forming a 50:50 joint venture with US-based EdgeConneX to build hyperscale data centre parks in six cities.
The data centre industry of India is likely to increase to 1,007 MW by the year 2023 from its current capacity of 447 MW. Airtel has nearly 130 data edge centres, and all together, including its ten large data centres, it has a total capacity of 100 MW.
Increasing digital connectivity, IoT-linked devices, data localisation, the launch of 5G, cloud adoption indicates that the data centre of India would need an investment of $3.7 billion over the coming three years to satisfy a greenfield development opportunity of 6 million sq ft for this sector…
The company’s push for data centres comes as it looks to tap into the increasing need to store digital information locally amid a strong uptake in digital payments and the imminent launch of 5G services.
