RIL JV to invest $11B for 1 GW data centres in AP

Digital Connexion, a joint venture between Reliance Industries, Brookfield and US-based Digital Realty, on Wednesday announced a whopping investment of $11 billion (around Rs 98,000 crore) by 2030 to set up 1 GW of data centre capacity in Andhra Pradesh.

The AI-native, purpose-built data centres will span 400 acres in Visakhapatnam, the digital infrastructure company said in a statement.

"Digital Connexion...announced an investment of approximately $11 billion over a period of five years till 2030 for building 1 gigawatt state-of-the-art AI-native, purpose-built data centres in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh across 400 acres of land," the company statement said.

The planned 1 GW (1000 MW of electricity consumption at full capacity operation) facility in Visakhapatnam is expected to use electricity equivalent to nearly 50% of Mumbai's annual consumption.

Digital Connexion has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Andhra Pradesh Economic Development Board for making the investment, the statement said.

This is the second major investment in the country, following Google's announcement last month to invest $15 billion in Andhra Pradesh to build an artificial intelligence hub comprising data centres in Visakhapatnam.

Amazon.com Inc. has also announced plans to invest $12.7 billion in cloud infrastructure by 2030, while OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is preparing to establish a 1-gigawatt data centre in the region.

Microsoft is also expanding its data centre footprint in India, a key growth market with nearly a billion internet users. Billionaires Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani have similarly announced significant investments to boost data centre capacity in the country.

Analysts project India's data centre market to top $100 billion by 2027.

According to a recent CBRE report, India has attracted nearly $94 billion in DC investment commitments since 2019, with $30 billion in the first nine months of the present year, leading to total capacity surpassing 1.5 gigawatts.

"Digital Connexion data centres are purpose-built to support seamless AI workload, empowering hyperscalers and enterprises with future-ready systems, robust substations, redundant power feeds, and rack densities to power the next decade of innovation," the statement said.

The company already has a campus in Chennai, and another with 40 megawatt capacity is being constructed in Mumbai's Chandivali area. Both are strategically located for low-latency, carrier-neutral connectivity.

The three-way joint venture Digital Connexion was formed by Brookfield Infrastructure, Reliance Industries and Digital Realty in December 2023 for developing world-class data centres in India.

Digital Connexion had launched its first data centre campus in January 2024 to handle up to 100 megawatt (MW) critical IT load capacity spread across a 10-acre campus in Chennai.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s leading technology services exporter, raised $1 billion from global private equity company TPG for its AI data centre business, HyperVault. TCS’ HyperVault is planned to be an AI-ready infrastructure targeted at hyperscalers and enterprises. It will offer purpose-built, liquid-cooled data centres with high rack densities, energy efficiency and network connectivity across all key cloud regions.

The growing demand for AI-led services has put India on the path to becoming a key global hub for AI-powered data centres.

Global consultancy firm Deloitte in its report titled ‘Attracting AI Data Centre Infrastructure Investment in India’ notes that India is set to become one of the fastest growing leaders in AI—the country’s AI market is expected to reach $20 billion to $22 billion by 2027, at a compounded annual growth rate of 30%. Most importantly, the country generates 20% of the world’s data.

Neha Aggarwal, Partner, Deloitte India, says, “India's strategic location allows it to serve domestic and global markets effectively, positioning it as a critical node in the global data centre ecosystem.”

(With inputs from PTI)