Hyderabad: The city will see significant hyperscale capacity data centres development in the next few years, with two major hyperscalers — each with 100+ acres of land — having projects in various stages of development. Typically, a hyperscale data centre has more than 5,000 servers.
“India’s data centre market continues to grow robustly, with the total capacity projected to rise to 2 GW by 2026. There is nearly 525 MW capacity under various phases of construction across cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru,” said Devi Shankar, executive director, industrial, logistics and data centres, Anarock Capital.
Cloud computing, technology advancements, 5G rollouts and the digitalisation of banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) continue to be the demand drivers with artificial intelligence (AI) workloads to ramp this demand up further.
These growth drivers are projected to push the India data centre market value to $11.6 bn (over `1 lakh crore) by 2032, said the report by Anarock Capital.
With the increase in cloud computing and large-scale AI-led demand, the industry will see various large campuses to house this growing demand. Data centre operators are increasingly investing in large-scale projects with capacities of over 100+ MW, the report said.
Data centres have also emerged as an attractive asset class for institutional investors in the last few years, with a large capital pool being committed and deployed. The industry has seen advancements on various fronts and will continue growing exponentially in the next 2-3 years.
As per Nasscom, India’s AI market is expected to grow at a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 20 per cent between 2023 and 2028. This will strengthen the data centre demand. With this increasing AI workloads, data centres are becoming increasingly dense and power-consuming. The average rack density is anticipated to increase up to 30 KW/rack compared to the existing 8-10 KW/rack server density.
The Indian data centre industry will also witness incremental growth in setting up of edge data centre facilities closer to end-users and devices generating data. These facilities are expected to manage the growing data traffic from Tier II and III cities and support over-the-top (OTT) platforms, IoT (internet of things) devices, gaming, and smart cities with reduced latency and a better consumer experience.
